Science of Psychology 1 PDF

The Science of Psychology Definition of Psychology? Scientific study of human behavior Overt & Covert from different perspectives  Kenneth Burke 1897-1993 “ Every way of seeing is a way not seeing.”  “Jessica is asked to develop a management st...

The Science of Psychology Definition of Psychology? Scientific study of human behavior Overt & Covert from different perspectives  Kenneth Burke 1897-1993 “ Every way of seeing is a way not seeing.”  “Jessica is asked to develop a management strategy that will encourage safer work practices in an assembly plant.” Industrial/organizational “ what teaching methods most effectively motivate elementary school students to successfully accomplish academic tasks?” Educational Psych. “ what mental processes are involved in solving complex word problems?” Cognitive Psych.  “ a strong fear of crowds leads a young woman to seek treatment for her phobia.” Clinical Psych. “ Janet’s job is demanding and stressful. She wonders if her lifestyle is making her more prone to certain illnesses such as cancer and heart diseases.” Health Psych. “What chemicals are released in the human body as a result of a stressful event? What are their effects on behavior?” Biopsychology  “It is thought that pornographic films that depict violence against women can prompt aggressive behavior in some men.” Social Psych. “At what age do children generally acquire an emotional attachment to their fathers?” Developmental Psych. “ Joan, a college freshman, is panicking. She needs to learn better organizational skills and study habits to cope with the demands of college.” Counseling Psych. What kind of psychologist are you?  Scientific study of human behavior Empirical Data observation experimentation measurement  Focus? Repair mental illness (weakness) Determine causality *(Correlational) Classification Diagnosis Treatment  2000- Martin Seligman Examine healthy states Positive Psychology Read Psychology: Repair weaknesses Cultivate strengths  Science? “How something is studied” Scientific Method  Psychology is the study of “common sense” “Hindsight Bias” Overestimating our ability to predict an outcome once the outcome is known” “ Diffusion of Responsibility” Kitty Genovese Experimentation is ESSENTIAL VIDEO 1  Applied vs. Basic Psychology Q1: How do adolescents and adults differ in their approach to moral issues such as honesty? Q2: How can knowledge about moral development be used to prevent teenage theft and violence? PSYCHOLOGY: Empirical Data Application HISTORY  Greek philosophers Abstract Theoretical deductions “A Priori” Wilhelm Wundt (1879) Experimental Psychology Empirical data A Posteriori “Trolley problem” Is philosophy a science? READ He provided a pathway to experimentally analyze psychological phenomena (tied directly to physiological actions in the brain) Hermann Helmholtz 1850  FATHER OF PSYCHOLOGY Independent 1879 (1ST lab in Germany) Theory of conscious thought “Started out by studying consciousness because he believed that psychology should focus on understanding the structure of the human mind by analyzing the basic elements of conscious experience, essentially viewing consciousness as the core component of mental processes that could be scientifically examined and broken down into its parts”. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-fmcc-intropsychmaster/chapter/history-of-psychology/ immediate sensation/ immediate perception Structuralism Reductionism Introspection: biased data (inherently subjectivity and lacks replicable results) Even though he did it in a controlled laboratory setting Psychology as the “science of conscious experience” Contribution? Stanley Hall Francis Sumner Albert Beckham Kenneth Clark First The The The Experimental “ Father of “ First African “ Doll Study” Psychological Black American 1940 laboratory Psychology” School The in the US 1920 Psychologist” “ First Black 1884 1924 President of the APA”  Figure 2.3 (a) Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman to earn a doctorate degree in psychology. (b) The outcome of Brown v. Board of Education was influenced by the research of psychologist Inez Beverly Prosser, who was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in psychology. William James READ Functionalism How? Why? EXPLAIN Structuralism What? DESCRIBE  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJm7AhdGbDk&t=6s Sigmund Freud- 1900s 1856-1939 Theory Psychoanalysis Treatment  Maladaptive Behavior? Trephination Exorcism Weyer: 1500 Mentally ill - not possessed Pinel: 1700 Humane and moral treatment Explain Maladaptive behavior? 1900 Biological Model Psychological (Medical) Model “Physical symptoms are often Disease the surface manifestation of deeply repressed conflicts” Psychological/Emotional conflicts UNCONSCIOUS Read Miller M.D. Biological Model Psychological (Medical) Model Underlying cause Body/Brain Psyche/Mind  Prison Break clip: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j9eLKnA5LfeWKv- g_3qYLkgXvzU3lnof/view?usp=sharing Historical Figure? “Freud gave people a new way of thinking about why they acted the way they did. He created a whole new way of interpreting behaviors. One could claim that a person had motives, desires and beliefs, all buried in the unconscious….. which Read McLeod directly controlled and motivated Go to SD pg. 4 their conscious thought and https:// www.simplypsycholo behavior.” gy.org/unconscious- mind.html  Prof. Paul Bloom Yale University “A lot of people ask why do we have an unconscious at all? One has to keep in mind that the vast majority of what our brain and minds do is unconscious in nature. So the right question to ask is not why are some things unconscious, rather, why is this tiny subset of mental activity conscious?”  Today: Biopsychosocial Model Go to history of psychology section (in textbook)  BEHAVIORISM the impetus behind change (i.e., behavior) is external Mechanistic model: people are like machines that react to environmental input In contrast Organismic model: people are active, growing organisms that set their own development in motion (the impetus behind change (i.e., behavior) is internal J.B. Watson Early 1900s Behaviorism Overt behavior Do not examine the mind, examine the environment “Behaviorism was based on the belief that psychology would only advance as a science if it turned away from the study of mental processes (and the unconscious) and limited itself to the study of observable behaviors that could be recorded and measured.” Watson's behaviorism rejected the studying of consciousness. He was convinced that it could not be studied, and that past attempts to do so have only been hindering the advancement of psychological theories.  “mind was irrelevant to understanding behavior” why? Because an objective analysis of the mind was impossible VIDEO3: “blank slate” What determines behavior? ENVIRONMENT  ENVIRONMENT SHAPES behavior Classical Conditioning Stimulus-response (S-R To predict ) theory behavior… Control the environment  Pavlov’s work on the CR coincided with launch of Behaviorism (Watson) Discovery Watson: 1916 adopted CR “I had worked the thing out in terms of habit formation (learned behavior). It was only later, when I began to dig into the vague word “habit” that I saw the enormous contribution Pavlov had made and how easily the Application conditioned reflex (CR) could be looked upon as the unit of what we had been calling habit. I certainly, from that point on, gave the master his due credit.” ` “Human behavior is a product of conditioning and learning” (Experience)  Infamous quote: “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well- formed and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I will guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select; a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a merchant, and yes, even a thief regardless of his talents, tendencies, abilities and race of his ancestors... ” (Watson 1924) “men are made not born”  “I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.” Took an extreme environmental position without any scientific evidence to back it up (i.e., 100 % a product of our experiences/environment; a product of conditioned or learned responses) He went against the advocate of the contrary (i.e., biological determinism) to deemphasize biology even though he once did believe in the impact of genetic and biological predisposition on human behavior.  B.F. Skinner Bio + Env = Behavior consequences The cognitive approach Banaji VIDEO 4 believes that internal mental behavior can be scientifically studied using controlled Operant 20th century preeminent psychologist experiments. It uses the Conditioning results of its investigations to Rejected C make inferences about mental processes. (reflexive behavior) VIDEO 4- start at as a model for all behavior 2:50 voluntary acts? Behavioral Contingencies consequences R-O theory “What is the role of operant techniques in dealing with human psychopathologies? Skinner: “Neurotic symptoms are learned from the environment, not because of any innate deep inside disorders.” (Read bio/psych) When you change the environment, you change the symptoms. People call it symptoms, I don’t. That’s the whole trouble with the mentalistic philosophy, they make behavior into a symptom rather than the very thing we are interested in.”  Epigenetics: how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work Epigenetics turns genes "on" and "off.” Unlike genetic changes (mutations), epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change the sequence of DNA bases, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence. Epigenetic changes can affect your health in different ways. https://www.cdc.gov/genomics-and-health/about/epigenetic-impacts-on-health.html Bio + Env = Behavior Video 10 epigenome (lifespan videos) 2:17-2:44 7:48-8:13 Behaviorism DOMINATED 1900-1960  Criticism “What came to be felt as the appropriate criticism within psychology of the work of those days was the absence of sufficient internal structure..., the absence of the complexity and subtle processes of memory and of language comprehension and production.” Cognitive Revolution 1960s- Cognitive Psychology S-O-R theory “the behaviorist stated that psychology should study actual observable behavior, and that nothing happends between stimulus and response (i.e., cognitive processes). Edward Tolman (1948) challenged these assumptions by proposing that people and animals are active information processes and not passive learners as behaviorism had suggested. Tolman developed a cognitive view of Edward C. Tolman learning that has become popular in modern cognitive map: mental map for a psychology. Tolman believed individuals do more given process or concept than merely respond to stimuli; they act on beliefs, Latent learning: a type of learning attitudes, changing conditions, and they strive toward which is not apparent in the goals. Tolman found the stimulus-response theory learner's behavior at the time of unacceptable, because reinforcement was not learning, but which manifests later necessary for learning to occur. He felt that behavior when a suitable motivation and was mainly cognitive. Toman coined the term circumstances appear. cognitive map and latent learning. (McLeod, 2013)