PSY1101 Chapter 1 PDF

10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Chapter 1 Wednesday, October 09, 2024 12:47 AM Chapter 1: What Is Psychology? Figure 1.1: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it ca...

10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Chapter 1 Wednesday, October 09, 2024 12:47 AM Chapter 1: What Is Psychology? Figure 1.1: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it can also show the many ways psychology manifests. In the image above, many behaviors related to psychology are seen—we could ask questions about the relationships between the people in the photo, about the child’s development, about how and why the emotions being shown are occurring, or even about the cultural issues and dynamics of an interracial relationship. We might also ask about the usefulness of the photograph for cueing memories about the event depicted. 1.0 Learning Objectives After completing this chapter, you should be able to: 1. Explain how the scientific discipline of psychology emerged, as well as name and describe its major subfields. 2. Describe, compare, and contrast the various careers within psychology, such as conducting research or practicing in the field of psychology (e.g., clinical psychologists and psychiatrists). 3. Name and explain the major movements in the development of psychology as a scientific field, and identify the people who led these movements. 4. Name and explain the major developments in the clinical use of psychology, and identify the individuals involved. 5. Understand how ultimate and proximate explanations of psychological phenomena can complement each other, leading to a fuller understanding of the field of psychology. 6. Understand, describe, and apply the major perspectives within the field of psychology today. 1.1 Introduction: What Is Psychology? When you think of the word psychology, you likely imagine one or more things. Many people imagine a therapy session: a person sitting back with a notepad, listening while a client talks. Others might imagine an inspirational speaker, telling the world how they can become their best selves. Those with a little background knowledge might imagine lab rats in mazes, brain scans, or even advertising executives concocting ways to get you to buy the latest piece of technology. In truth, psychology can be all of these things and more. As you read this book, you’ll begin to realize how broad of a field psychology really is. Loading... Understanding the thoughts and actions of oneself and others has intrigued philosophers for thousands of years. However, psychology as we know it today is a relatively recent field that spans less than 150 years. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, much of what we would now understand as psychology was relegated to the realms of philosophy, theology, and anatomy. The word psychology comes from these early traditions and has its roots in Greek, literally meaning “the study of the psyche, or soul” (psyche—“breath, spirit, soul” + logia—“study of”). Today, however, we can better define it as the scientific study of both behavior and mind. In this chapter, we will take a tour of early thought in psychology, learn about who psychologists are and what they do, review the occasionally tumultuous history of psychology, and consider how many psychologists today approach issues in the field. By the end of the chapter, you should have a broad understanding of the types of topics psychologists are interested in and why they're interested in them. Figure 1.2: The psyche root of the word psychology (which means “breath, spirit, or soul”) comes from the Greek goddess whose name is Psyche (pictured above in an eighteenth-century painting by Jacques-Louis David). https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 1/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Loading... Loading... 1.1.1 Early Work in Psychology As discussed, the notion of psychology as its own discipline is a relatively new one. Throughout history, people have been interested in other people: Social interaction and attempting to understand others is an essential aspect of being human. Much of the initial thought related to psychology was done by philosophers in a discipline known as the philosophy of mind. Although religious traditions have considered the nature of the soul for thousands of years, ancient (fourth-century BC) Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, were some of the first recorded formal thinkers on the topic. Aristotle’s De Anima (“On the Soul,” or Peri Psyches in the original Greek) considers topics such as the nature of thought, sensation, and imagination, for example. He also introduced the term tabula rasa (or “blank slate”) to describe the mind, considering it a place of potential for experience to write upon (see Figure 1.3). Figure 1.3: Early thought in psychology, such as the concept of the mind as a tabula rasa, was often the province of philosophers such as Aristotle. Parallel to thought-related philosophical questions about the mind were developments in the understanding of anatomy and physiology, although this work was generally considered to be in the realm of medicine or biology rather than related directly to the mind. One of the first documented efforts to explain psychological disorders as illnesses (rather than possession by spirits, for example) was done in the Muslim world. ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Majusi (often Latinized as Haly Abbas) was a Persian physician who wrote The Complete Art of Medicine during the tenth century. This book was one of the first to both describe the neuroanatomy of the brain and discuss a variety of mental illnesses and their treatments. As psychology began to emerge as a separate discipline, the information physiologists had collected regarding the brain, sensory systems, and the biomechanics of nerves and muscle movement proved invaluable to the fledgling field. Because psychology is generally focused on answering questions about the mind through behavioral evidence, it is often considered to be a union of philosophy and physiology, with many early psychologists attempting to answer the questions asked by philosophers with evidence gathered by physiologists. Loading... Loading... 1.1.2 Mind, Body, and Behavior Before we continue, let’s circle back and reconsider our definition of psychology as a whole: the scientific study of both behavior and mind. There are three important terms in this definition: scientific, behavior, and mind. First, it is important to note that psychology is a science and uses the scientific method to reach its conclusions. The scientific method will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2: Methods, but for now it is enough to know that the scientific method is rooted in a philosophical tradition known as empiricism. Empiricism is the view that knowledge arises directly from what we observe and experience. As such, psychology (as with all scientific disciplines) is inherently observational in nature. This fact is important because much of what psychology is interested in is inherently unobservable. It is impossible to know, for example, exactly what someone else is thinking at any given moment. Further, the concept of mind is entirely unobservable for all intents and purposes. Yet psychology persists as a discipline. How can this be? Here is where behavior comes into play. Psychologists use behavior—actions, words, response times, or even brain activity—to make inferences about what is happening in the mind. Early psychologists used findings from physiology to make inferences about the mind. How reliable these inferences are, of course, is up for some debate (see Barrett, 2009; Poldrack, 2011). As we’ll discuss throughout this chapter and the rest of this book, observable behaviors of all sorts are the primary form of evidence in psychology. One of the basic questions that psychologists have had to deal with is a concept that deals directly with the relationship between behavior and mind—dualism. Dualism (also called mind–body dualism) is the philosophical position that the mind and the body are separate entities. In many ways, people are “intuitive” dualists, believing themselves and others to exist apart from their physical bodies. Consider, for example, how many cultures consider the afterlife as a place for the soul while the body remains behind on Earth (but see Hodge, 2008, for a counterargument). Dualism was best described by https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 2/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (see Figure 1.4), who argued that the mind is inherently immaterial. He believed that thought could not be explained in terms of the physical body, although the mind could exert its influence over the body through the pineal gland (a small pinecone-shaped structure located near the center of the brain that is now believed to regulate circadian rhythms). Descartes also gave us the concept of the reflex, which he argued was the body acting without conscious action—without the mind (see Figure 1.5). The reflex is a concept we still use today in physiology, although Descartes wasn’t entirely aware of how reflexes worked. Where conscious muscle movement involves signals from the brain, reflexes (such as blinking in response to an object moving toward the face or jerking your knee in response to being tapped in a certain way) are handled entirely by the spinal cord. Descartes took his argument further, contending that while all animal behavior was the result of unconscious reflex, human consciousness (e.g., “I think, therefore I am”) was evidence for a mind, and thus a soul. Figure 1.4: A portrait of René Descartes by František Ženíšek (1849–1916). Figure 1.5: Observe Descartes’ illustration of the reflex: Touching something hot causes an involuntary recoil. To the right is a schematic view of the pineal gland, located near the center of the brain. Although Descartes was influential in both philosophy and physiology, by placing the mind as an inherently immaterial, unknowable agent that forces its will upon the body, he removed it from the realm of scientific inquiry. If studying the body and its behaviors can provide no insight into the mind, then psychology is a fruitless endeavor. Most psychologists today do not adopt a dualistic perspective on the mind for this reason. Instead, they assume that the mind and the brain are in fact the same. As famously put by psychologist Steven Pinker, most modern psychologists would agree that “the mind is what the brain does” (Pinker, 1997, p. 21) or that “the mind is the activity of the brain” (p. 64). In other words, a modern conception of the mind is that it is the sum of all brain activity, from every firing neuron to every chemical message. Today’s psychologists use behavior to make inferences about the mind, an endeavor that has been quite successful thus far. For example, it is commonly believed that many mental illnesses are a direct result of problems with brain function or chemical imbalance. Similarly, psychologists have been able to map specific kinds of mental processing (e.g., visual perception) to specific areas of the brain. Loading... Please use the following diagrams below to answer Question 1.06. Figure A Figure B https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 3/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Figure C Figure D Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Mini-lecture by Dr. Kousaie: Loading... 1.2 What Do Psychologists Do? Defining psychology as the scientific study of behavior and mind is a necessarily broad definition because psychologists are involved in many different areas of study and practice. The work that psychologists do can generally be divided into three primary areas: basic research, application, and clinical work. While these distinctions are useful, it is important to remember that many psychologists work in several of these areas at once. 1.2.1 Basic Research in Psychology Psychologists who do basic research in psychology attempt to understand the fundamental principles that govern behavior and mind. Additionally, most basic research in psychology is conducted with perfectly healthy people, not clinical populations; in fact, much psychological research is done with introductory psychology students such as yourselves. If you are required to complete a number of “research credits” (or something similar), you are actually participating in discovering new knowledge in the field of psychology. In today’s increasingly online world, however, research subject populations are changing. Many researchers have begun taking advantage of online systems to collect data about the human mind, which comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Figure 1.6: Basic research in psychology can take many forms, from surveys to measuring the brain’s electrical signals. Typically, psychologists who do basic research are interested in a specific aspect of psychology, such as social interaction, memory, or how neurons interact with one another. These specialties often belong to larger, primary basic research areas: https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 4/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Abnormal psychology research is interested in explaining how and why unusual and maladaptive behavior patterns develop by examining thoughts and emotions as well as the underlying biology of mental illness. Behavioral genetics research attempts to explain individual differences in behavior patterns in terms of variation in genetic structure and expression. Cognitive psychology research is broadly interested in how people process information and includes areas such as attention, perception, memory, problem solving, language, and thought. Comparative psychology is the study of the behavior of non-human animals, and it is often (but not always) interested in making a comparison to human psychology in an effort to discover underlying universals. Developmental psychology studies the way that people develop across the lifespan, including how our thoughts and behaviors change as we age. Behavioral neuroscience (sometimes called cognitive neuroscience or neuropsychology) tries to understand how specific brain regions or activities produce behavior, allowing psychologists to understand the physical underpinnings of their observations. Personality psychology studies individual differences, investigating how and why people act differently based on their enduring characteristics or traits. Social psychology is interested in how an individual’s thoughts and actions are influenced by the social environment and the presence of others. These major areas of basic research in psychology are summarized in Table 1.1, and each subfield will be explored throughout this text. Please click here to view the text version of Table 1.1. Table 1.1: Examples of Basic Research in Psychology. While most psychologists who do basic research are employed in academic settings by colleges and universities, some basic research is done by governments and private industries as well. Psychologists who do independent basic research typically have significant postgraduate training, with a Ph.D. (doctorate of philosophy) often required in many settings (such as professors who do research as well as teach). Additionally, many psychologists who do basic research identify with their area of specialty (e.g., “I’m a cognitive psychologist.”) Basic research can often be described as investigating the how and why of behavior, without regard for the ways the information will ultimately be used. That said, basic research is often incredibly useful. If a psychologist has a firm grasp of how a given behavior occurs, the behavior can usually be influenced in useful ways to solve practical problems. Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Mini-lecture by Dr. Kousaie: Loading... 1.2.2 Applied Psychology Solving practical problems is the major focus of applied psychology. Typically, the goal is to change behavior to solve some practical problem, such as resolving mental health issues, improving workplace efficiency, or improving educational outcomes. Sometimes the opposite approach is taken, however. Rather than attempt to change behavior, a psychologist who does applied work might solve a problem by devising a way to alter the environment so that it better matches the behaviors people already engage in. An https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 5/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote example of this could be improving the design of a keyboard used by helicopter pilots so that text entry is faster and has fewer errors (Francis & Rash, 2005). Figure 1.7: Applied psychologists work in many fields, including with military organizations. Optimizing the keyboard a pilot uses to reduce typing time and error rates is one such example of applied psychology. Applied psychology can be further divided into two primary areas: research and practice. Applied research is done to discover a new or more effective way to solve some specific problem, while applied practice refers to the actual application of techniques to the problems themselves. Applied research and practice can often be cyclical, with psychologists conducting research about a problem and then applying the research to create a solution. As a result, psychologists may be involved in both or only one of these facets of applied work, and the same psychologists may be involved in basic research as well. Note that a great deal of research in psychology today focuses on taking research that was originally basic in nature and applying it to practical problems. This kind of research, while applied, has its roots in basic research. It is referred to as translational research, which is the effort to translate basic findings into practical solutions. The distinction between translational and applied research can be confusing at first. Translational research is applied research, but it is necessarily based on an attempt to apply discoveries from basic research to practical problems. An example of translational research may be useful. Recent basic research in cognitive psychology suggests that people remember information better over the long term if they have experience successfully remembering the information, such as on a quiz or as part of studying (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; also see Chapter 8: Memory). This basic finding of how memory works can be translated into a useful application in educational settings to help solve the “problem” of improving student learning. Translational research would attempt to discover the best ways to have students practice retrieving information. Is it best to have students take lots of tests every day, for example? Or are there more practical ways to adhere to this basic finding? Throughout this text, you’ll notice that you are frequently asked questions about what you just read, and generally you will be asked more questions at the end of each section. These questions are a translational research effort to apply the basic research finding that practicing remembering aids in long-term retention. In addition to helping you learn, the questions asked throughout this text are also a great example of the outcomes of translational research. Applied psychology as a whole is typically broken up according to the problems that psychologists in the field are trying to solve. Because there are many different kinds of problems for which psychology can provide a relevant perspective, there are many different kinds of applied psychology. For each of these areas, a psychologist could pursue research, practice, or both. Generally, the amount of training a psychologist focusing on applied work has varies based on the nature of the work. In academic settings, psychologists doing independent applied research are generally required to have a Ph.D., just like those who do basic research. In private industry or government work, however, requirements often vary. Generally, more practice-oriented fields require less formal training and place a higher premium on experience. For example, management consultants may have a master’s degree in industrial/organizational psychology, or they may simply have experience in the industry. In many cases, people who practice applied psychology may not explicitly identify as psychologists, preferring to focus on the type of work they do instead. Table 1.2 lists some of the major fields of work in applied psychology, with examples of the kinds of research and practice that go on in each. This text will touch on many of these fields—keep an eye out for each as you continue to read. Please click here to view the text version of Table 1.2. Table 1.2: Examples of Applied Work in Psychology Note: Educational psychology focuses on learning outcomes, whereas school psychology focuses on students’ overall experience. Loading... https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 6/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Mini-lecture by Dr. Kousaie: Loading... 1.2.3 Clinical Psychology In general, clinical psychology is defined by its focus on identifying, preventing, and relieving distress or dysfunction that is psychological in origin. Technically, clinical psychology is just another form of applied psychology with a focus on mental health and wellness. Despite this, it deserves its own section because clinical work is by far the dominant type of work that occurs in psychology. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), just over half of the organization’s members work in a discipline related to clinical psychology (APA Center for Workforce Studies, 2017), but not all psychologists are required to be members. (It is worthy to note that “school” psychology, discussed in the applied section above, is sometimes considered a part of clinical psychology because it has a “helping” focus.) Additionally, many students who take introductory psychology courses do so because of an interest in its clinical applications. Psychologists who do clinical work come in many varieties. You may have noticed earlier that one area of basic research is abnormal psychology, for example. Some clinical psychologists (typically those who work in academic settings) do basic research on abnormal psychology in addition to seeing clients. Clinical neuroscientists might work in hospital settings, working with doctors and patients to investigate how the brain develops or reacts to certain other diseases or medical procedures, such as chemotherapy. Other clinicians might work on applied research, investigating new forms of therapy. The vast majority of clinical psychologists, however, are practice focused, diagnosing and treating mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, among others. Clinical psychologists generally have advanced academic training, such as a Ph.D. or Psy.D. (doctor of psychology). A Ph.D. program in clinical psychology encourages original research in addition to providing training on how to diagnose and treat mental illness, while a Psy.D. program usually focuses mostly on practice. Figure 1.8: Clinical psychologists practice the kind of psychology that most people think about when they hear the word “psychologist.” Clinical psychologists are often contrasted with psychiatrists, who are medical doctors that focus on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. The difference lies in their training and approach to treatment. While clinical psychologists receive advanced graduate training in clinical psychology, psychiatrists are required to first complete medical school before completing a residency in psychiatry as their area of specialization. Because psychiatrists are medical doctors and do not have the same type of training as a clinical psychologist, psychiatrists typically focus on pharmacotherapy (prescribing medications) as the primary means of treating mental illness. Most clinical psychologists lack the training to prescribe medication; however, a handful of states allow clinical psychologists to complete additional training programs in psychopharmacology to gain prescription privileges (McGrath, 2010). At present, clinical psychologists typically work together with psychiatrists or general practitioners to meet the needs of their clients. In addition to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, counseling psychologists are another major career path in clinical psychology. The largest difference between clinical and counseling psychologists is in terms of the severity of the issues they treat. Whereas clinical psychologists tend to diagnose and treat more severe forms of mental illness, counseling psychologists generally focus on helping people deal with ongoing life problems or stressors, or dealing with the transition from one life situation to another. Examples of counseling psychologists include marriage and family therapists, https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 7/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote career counselors, and addiction counselors. Many colleges and universities also have counselors on campus to help students with the transition from secondary school. Counselors and counseling psychologists are generally required to have some graduate training in counseling, whether at the master’s (counselors) or Ph.D. level (counseling psychologists). Licensing requirements vary by jurisdiction. Table 1.3 summarizes the different kinds of people who practice clinical psychology. Please click here to view the text version of Table 1.3. Table 1.3: Types of Clinicians Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Mini-lecture by Dr. Kousaie: Loading... Loading... 1.3 The History of Psychology So far we have discussed the nature of psychology and what modern-day psychologists do. But how did we arrive where we are today? Before discussing specific movements in psychology, it’s useful to explore a few of the influential questions, issues, and theories that have shaped the way psychology has developed and continues to develop today. While psychology as its own discipline has a relatively recent history, its intellectual roots in both philosophy and physiology continue to influence thought in psychology today. 1.3.1 Influential Themes in the History of Psychology The work of philosophers tends toward ultimate questions that are in many ways speculative and difficult to study scientifically, such as “Where does knowledge come from?” or “What is the nature of the mind and soul?” Many of these questions still guide psychologists today, as we continue to consider the nature of the mind through more advanced measurement techniques. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 8/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote 1.3.1.1 Nature versus Nurture The question about where knowledge comes from speaks to an issue you have likely heard of before: the nature–nurture debate. Put simply, to what extent is the human experience shaped by nature, and to what extent does the environment play a role? The science of psychology is rooted in an empiricist tradition—the idea that true knowledge about psychology can only be obtained through observation—but we can apply empiricism to this problem as well. An entirely empiricist perspective on human experience would argue that the mind begins as a blank slate and who we are is shaped entirely by the experiences we have. A contrasting position to empiricism is nativism, which hypothesizes that some forms of knowledge are innate. Taken to its logical extreme, this position is called biological determinism. The biological determinist position is largely untenable, however—it is obvious that people learn and change as a result of their experiences. Nativism should not be dismissed completely, though. For many of the basic processes of perception, for example, it is difficult to change the way a person sees something given additional experience. Optical illusions demonstrate this well. Loading... Observers tend to perceive the top line in this situation (called the “Ponzo illusion”) as longer relative to the bottom line, despite their equal length—even when aware that the lines are the same size (see Figure 1.9). Similarly, even though we can tell you that the blue-and-yellow “rotating snakes” image in Figure 1.10 is static and unchanging, it is nearly impossible for you not to perceive movement in the image. Additionally, a large variety of individual differences in temperament, intelligence, and personality have been shown to have at least some biological component (Plomin & Deary, 2015; Saudino, 2005; South et al., 2015). Figure 1.9: This image shows the “Ponzo illusion," first described by Mario Ponzo (1882–1960). Despite knowing that the lines are of equal length, people tend to perceive the top line as longer. It is hypothesized that this is due to an innate understanding of depth cues, similar to how we understand the components of a train track. Figure 1.10: This is one version of the rotating snakes illusion (Kitaoka, 2003). Motion is spontaneously perceived, despite knowing that the image is static. While these demonstrations might be compelling, it is difficult to prove that these kinds of illusions are in fact innate. However, researchers have attempted to gather evidence in support of the nativist theory all the same. For example, children who were born blind and receive surgical correction for their vision are still susceptible to the Ponzo illusion immediately after surgery, despite not having any visual experience at all (Gandhi, Kalia, Ganesh, & Sinha, 2015). They are also susceptible to the Müller-Lyer illusion in Figure 1.11. Figure 1.11: The Müller-Lyer illusion is shown here. Most people report observing that the middle line appears longer than the other two. 1.3.1.2 Evolutionary Psychology Related to the nature–nurture debate, many early psychologists were heavily influenced by the discipline of biology. In particular, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859) has played a significant role in shaping thought in psychology, and evolutionary theory continues to be influential today (as we will discuss later in this chapter). Darwin’s insight was that over the course of many generations, traits that tend to be advantageous for survival and reproduction generally spread through a population more https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd=… 9/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote readily than traits that are not advantageous. Darwin called traits that are advantageous for survival and reproduction (such as a thick fur coat in an environment that is consistently cold) adaptive traits. He reasoned that adaptive traits tend to spread throughout a population by means of a process called natural selection because of the benefits they provide. Importantly, Darwin also recognized that these inherited traits could extend to behavioral tendencies, including human behavior (Darwin, 1871). Because the brain is a part of the body, it too is subject to natural selection. The video below describes natural selection. Watch it and answer the questions that follow. Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Most psychologists today recognize that many human faculties are at least in part products of natural selection, such as the capacity for language (Pinker, 2002; Bolhuis & Everaert, 2013). The theory of evolution lent additional support to nativist positions in psychology. Today, psychologists generally agree that most psychological phenomena are the result of interactions between nature and nurture rather than one over the other, and instead they argue over the extent to which nature and nurture are responsible. The recent boom in studies related to epigenetics attests to this tension. 1.3.1.3 The Mind–Body Connection While philosophers have often guided the questions that psychologists ask, the work of physiologists has helped psychologists forge links between the mind and the body. Early work in physiology often reached beyond its means, however, with phrenology as a prime example (see Figure 1.12). Popular in the early nineteenth century, phrenology made the case that the shape of the skull was the result of the size of brain structures beneath it. Further, because these different brain areas corresponded to different characteristics or abilities, phrenologists believed that knowing about the shape of a person’s skull could tell you about the person’s mental capacities as well. For example, phrenologists might claim to be able to tell you about a person’s tendency toward benevolence or attentiveness based on the shape of his or her head. Although now completely discredited, phrenology is a good example of how early, unscientific ideas about the relationship between the body and the mind have influenced how psychology has developed. The underlying assumption of phrenology—that brain areas are associated with specific functions—has been verified in more recent decades, although the proportions of the skull have nothing to do with it. Figure 1.12: An example of a phrenological map. Phrenology was insightful in that it linked brain regions to specific functions, but the links it proposed were entirely unsupported. Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... 1.3.2 Studying Psychology as a Science https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 10/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote While early thought on psychology provided promising starts, the scientific study of psychology did not emerge in earnest until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Wundt (see Figure 1.13) established the first psychological laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig in Germany, although he had already been conducting research in psychology prior to the lab’s founding. Trained as a physiologist and medical doctor, but also as a competent philosopher, Wundt knew how the experimental process worked and began applying it to psychology. In particular, Wundt was interested in sensation and perception—how people understand the world and turn it into ideas and thoughts. Mental experience—the mind—was his major area of study. Further, Wundt was the first person to self-identify as a psychologist, largely because of his interest in the mind. Today, Wundt is widely regarded as the “father of modern psychology” because of both the work he did in his laboratory and his efforts to establish psychology as its own discipline (Hunt, 1993). Many of his first experiments involved testing response time, such as how quickly people could respond to a presented sound. Figure 1.13: Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), in 1902. 1.3.2.1 Laying the Foundations: Structuralism Wundt and Edward Titchener—one of Wundt's most successful students—treated the mind much like chemists and physicists of the day treated the world itself: They wanted to break it down into fundamental pieces. John Dalton’s work on atomic theory in the early 1800s was particularly influential, as he demonstrated that substances such as water contained definitive proportions of hydrogen and oxygen. Many of the early thinkers in psychology adopted a similar position, attempting to break down immediate conscious experience into its basic elements. Introspection was a method refined by Wundt to understand the components of mental processes by relying on trained participants’ self-reports of their thoughts, feelings, and mental images. Figure 1.14: Wilhelm Wundt and his colleagues working in his University of Leipzig lab in roughly 1880. Because Wundt (and one of his most successful students, Edward Titchener) believed that psychology should focus on decomposing immediate conscious experience into its basic elements and understanding how those elements combine to create experience (Wundt, 1896), they believed that self-reports of conscious experience should be the primary form of evidence in psychology. Two people’s descriptions of a subjective experience can be wildly different, however, and it is difficult to have any kind of objective sense of accuracy about another person’s internal experiences. As we discussed earlier, making inferences about the mind is one of the fundamental problems psychology as a science faces. While they disagreed on the specifics, Wundt and Titchener believed that the problem could be solved through systematic introspection. Where introspection simply considered experiences of one individual, the process of systematic introspection attempted to standardize the way conscious experiences were reported so that one person’s experiences could be compared to another’s more effectively. Titchener’s laboratory used the technique extensively, and he developed an extremely detailed manual that was designed to train a person how to introspect “properly” (Titchener, 1901). Figure 1.15: Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927). Near the end of the nineteenth century, psychology as its own scientific discipline had begun to take off, with many of Wundt’s students spreading the study to other European countries as well as North America. Titchener himself immigrated to the United States and founded a laboratory at Cornell University. He (among others) is widely considered https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 11/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote responsible for popularizing the study of experimental psychology in North America, and he was also a charter member of the American Psychological Association (APA), which was founded in 1892 (Boring, 1929). Titchener popularized the approach of breaking conscious experience into elementary parts, a movement in psychology that came to be known as structuralism (and whose contributors are known as structuralists). While Wundt himself did not identify as a structuralist (Titchener misrepresented some of his works for an American audience—Wundt's school of thought was called voluntarism, and focused on the role of the will in organizing conscious experience), Wundt's training of Edward Titchener helped lay the foundation for Titchener's own movement of structuralism to flourish. Because of its experimental nature and widespread influence, structuralism is often recognized as the first significant movement in the history of psychology as a science. Loading... Loading... Loading... 1.3.2.2 Considering Purpose: Functionalism As the study of psychology progressed, structuralism and the practice of systematic introspection began receiving significant criticism, particularly in North America. Among these critics was William James (see Figure 1.16). William James was an American physician and philosopher, and he was the first person to offer a course on experimental psychology in the United States beginning in 1875 at Harvard University. These courses educated students on work that was being done in Germany prior to the official establishment of Wundt’s lab in 1879. As described by another famous psychologist of the time, G. Stanley Hall, James’ course was “up to the present time the only course in the country where students can be made familiar with the methods and results of recent German researches in physiological psychology” (Hall, 1879, p. 97). Hall was James’ student and the first person in the United States to receive a doctorate degree in psychology in 1878 (and also the first president of the American Psychological Association; Thorne & Henley, 2004). Figure 1.16: William James (1842–1910); the “father of American psychology.”. James’ position was that the structuralist movement was fundamentally misguided. In fact, he went so far as to say in a textbook that he wrote for undergraduates that “[Psychology] is no science, it is only the hope of science... at present psychology is in the state of physics before the laws of motion" (James, 1892, p. 468). This was meant to be inspiring—fundamental truths had yet to be discovered. While structuralists may be able to break down conscious experience into its basic elements, he argued that studying these pieces without an understanding of their function would provide little to no actual insight into the workings of the mind (James, 1884, 1890). The position that psychologists must first understand the function of a behavior or mental process to understand how its parts work together is called functionalism, and its proponents are called functionalists. Importantly, the functionalist movement was heavily influenced and inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859, 1871). Evolutionary theory heavily emphasizes the functional nature of traits and describes how adaptive traits exist to solve specific problems. Examples of physical adaptive traits would be the selection for hairiness in environments where cold weather is common, or camouflaged body patterns in animals whose primary defense from predators is to hide. While a structuralist might understand the length of each individual hair and the average spacing from one follicle to the next, a functionalist would argue that those details are meaningless without knowing that the purpose of fur is to keep the body warm. Functionalists simply extended the argument from physical traits to include psychological processes as well. James himself had a list of 37 “instincts” that he believed humans possess, from walking, acquisitiveness, and anger to cleanliness, sympathy, love, and a fear of strange men (James, 1892). Not all of these are still supported, of course. Because of his early work in the field of psychology as well as his influence with functionalism, William James is often considered the “father of American psychology.” However, James was not the only functionalist. In fact, James Rowland Angell (1907) is credited with defining the primary tenets of functionalism in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association. Due to functionalism’s focus on the problems that psychological processes solve, it also opened up the range of topics psychologists explored. For example, John Dewey was an early pioneer of educational psychology, and Edward Thorndike was influential in the field of animal learning. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 12/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote While functionalism may have offered an alternative perspective to structuralism for how to go about the process of psychological research, it would be unfair to say that functionalism superseded structuralism—structuralist approaches continued vigorously in Europe despite functionalism’s criticisms. For example, Oswald Külpe and his students at the University of Würzburg attempted to extend Wundt’s work to higher- order thought processes (Ogden, 1951). Similarly, a movement known as Gestalt psychology took root in Berlin, focusing on understanding how people perceived a unified whole out of the many chaotic individual elements of sensation (although this was in some opposition to traditional structuralism as well). The “snakes” optical illusion presented in Figure 1.10, for example, leads to a perception that is different from simply the sum of its parts—motion is perceived where none exists. Finally, both structuralism and functionalism (and most early work in psychology) focused on exploring immediate conscious experience, and they often used similar methods to do so. The next movement in psychology sought to shift psychology’s focus substantially. Loading... Loading... 1.3.2.3 Refining Methodology: Behaviorism As work in psychology continued into the early twentieth century, several factors led to the rise of a new movement: behaviorism. Many psychologists were growing increasingly skeptical of introspection and its inherently subjective nature. Because introspection was the primary method of studying conscious experience at the time, skepticism developed around how possible it was to study the mind in a scientific fashion. As these fears were rising, the study of animal psychology found itself gaining prominence as well. Importantly, introspection isn’t possible with animals—you can’t simply ask a dog or a lab rat to tell you what it’s thinking. Because of this, psychologists working with animals were forced to observe their behaviors: how quickly a rat can navigate a maze, the rate at which a dog learns that a bell indicates dinner is on its way, and so on. While both skepticism about the measurability of the mind and the increasing methodological rigor of animal psychology contributed to the eventual shift toward behaviorism, it was American psychologist John B. Watson who finished the job. Watson popularized the notion that the mind and internal mental states were beyond the scope of psychology, rebuking introspection as a meaningful technique and proposing that psychology should focus its efforts solely on the study of observable behavior (1913, 1919; see Figure 1.17 for a famous experiment conducted by Watson). Because of his belief that psychology should focus solely on behavior, he called his perspective behaviorism. Figure 1.17: John Watson (1878–1978) famously believed that people were purely a product of their experiences. In the above “Little Albert” experiment (so named for the boy pictured, “Albert”), Watson and his assistant, Rosalie Rayner (1898–1935), conditioned a child to fear the prosthetic beard Raynor wore (pictured above). Although Watson published his initial manifesto in 1913, World War I (1914–1918) may have delayed the rise of behaviorism. By the early 1920s, however, it was the dominant approach to psychology in North America. The influence of behaviorism on the study of psychology was extensive, with systematic introspection and references to consciousness virtually eliminated from work done in the field by the 1930s. Behaviorism continued to dominate the majority of scientific work done in psychology for decades, and psychologists generally constrained their research to observing animal behavior. Although a focus on the mind was mostly lost during these years, in many ways psychology became a much more methodologically rigorous science because of behaviorism. Figure 1.18: John B. Watson took a strong stance on how research in psychology should be conducted, as evidenced by some of his writings. By the 1950s, B. F. Skinner (see Figure 1.19) was one of the leading thinkers in behaviorist psychology. Skinner (1953) is best known for his work on operant conditioning in particular—the study of how behavior can be modified using a system of https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 13/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote rewards and punishments. Many of his basic theories on operant conditioning are still valid, and they continue to be influential today. Because the principles of operant conditioning focus on behavior in general, they can be applied to incredibly different tasks: Therapies to reduce self-harming behaviors in people with autism (Myers & Johnson, 2007), the treatment of cocaine addiction (Silverman, 2004), and the training of police dogs (Gerritsen & Haak, 2014) all use concepts related to operant conditioning. Figure 1.19: B.F. Skinner (1904–1990). Loading... Loading... 1.3.2.4 A Return to Mind: The Cognitive Revolution Although behaviorism’s grip on psychology was extensive, a renewed interest in mental processes and the mind began in the 1950s. Advances in methodology and measurement, as well as limitations in purely behaviorist models, spurred this renewed interest. This so-called cognitive revolution was a major shift away from the strict behaviorism that had dominated the field for several decades. Steven Pinker wrote about the cognitive revolution in his book The Blank Slate (2002) and discusses its importance in the video below. Loading... Loading... Today, most research in psychology does not take a strict behaviorist approach, preferring to use behavior as a means to make inferences about the processes happening in the mind. As Pinker argues in the video, the computer (and its increased “accessibility,” at least to researchers) was critical in shifting how psychologists thought about making inferences about the mind. Other technologies that allowed scientists to “peek under the hood” and see the brain in action were developed around the 1950s and 1960s as well, including cerebral angiography (the mapping of blood vessels in the brain), computerized tomography (CT) scans, and in the early 1970s radioactive neuroimaging, such as positron emission tomography (PET); see Figure 1.20. Figure 1.20: Left: A positron emission tomography (PET) scan of the brain. Right: A computerized tomography (CT) scan of the brain. Together, these new technologies (with the computer at the forefront) allowed psychologists to reevaluate their abilities to make inferences about people’s internal mental states. Furthermore, while “cognitive” refers to information processing in general, the cognitive revolution did not only help psychologists interested in cognitive psychology (remember, cognitive psychology is the study of topics such as attention, perception, and memory). By returning the focus of psychology to the scientific understanding of mind, many more avenues of research blossomed in psychology. To review the history of psychology, click through the interactive slides below: Loading... https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 14/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Click this link to view the Interactive Timeline on the History of Psychology in a new browser tab. 1.3.3 Development of Psychology in the Clinic Early thought on the treatment of mental illness was unsystematic and varied, with causes of mental illness thought to be anything from an imbalance of four bodily fluids (referred to as humors) to demonic possession. Notably, some early thinkers, such as the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, tenth-century Persian physician Haly Abbas, and Swiss “renaissance man” Paracelsus, did make ties between mental illness and the physical body, including the brain—even if these ties were incorrect. More modern conceptions of mental illnesses and their treatment didn’t emerge until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Sigmund Freud at the forefront. Figure 1.21: A young Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), in roughly 1885. 1.3.3.1 Freud and Psychoanalysis As psychology was beginning to develop as a science in the laboratories of Europe and the United States, Sigmund Freud (see Figure 1.21) was busy formalizing some of the first widely influential theories regarding the cause and treatment of mental illness in Vienna, Austria. Freud made a living as a physician, and he was drawn to psychology in an attempt to understand patients whose symptoms he believed had no physical cause (1953). His training as a neurologist (a doctor who specializes in diseases of the nervous system) led him to the conclusion that these patients were suffering from maladies that were psychological in nature. Specifically, Freud believed that these illnesses originated from the unconscious mind—a portion of the mind that is closed off from conscious analysis. Over the course of the next several decades, Freud (1900, 1910, 1940) described a system for understanding the unconscious mind and treating the illnesses that stem from it. He called this system psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis proposes multiple theories about the unconscious mind that touch on a variety of topics in psychology, including personality, development, and of course causes of mental illness. According to Freud’s system of psychoanalysis, the critical component to resolving mental health issues was the process of analyzing the contents of the unconscious mind so that relevant thoughts and feelings could be brought up to the level of consciousness. Another way of phrasing this is to say that he believed patients needed to gain insight into the unconscious factors that were causing them distress. To do this, he used a variety of techniques that he believed tapped into the unconscious mind, however obliquely—including analyzing minor errors or slips in speech, listening to his patients’ fantasies, having a patient report her thoughts freely and without filtering their content (i.e., free association), and dream analysis. Freud would spend hours and hours with his patients in an attempt to discover and analyze the contents of their unconscious minds. Freud’s focus on the unconscious mind was unique in his day, when other psychologists were busy studying introspection and behavior. Because of the broad nature of psychoanalytic theory and its place as one of the initial forms of modern therapy, Freud’s influence continues to be felt throughout popular culture and psychology today, although newer research and later movements in clinical psychology have certainly lessened his impact. We will explore Freud’s ideas in greater detail in Chapter 12: Personality and Chapter 15: Treatment of Psychological Disorders. Question 1.41 Review Mark as: None From where did Freud believe psychological problems originate? Select an answer and submit. For keyboard navigation, use the up/down arrow keys to select an answer. a The nervous system b An imbalance in bodily humors c A mismatch between our visions of our own identity d The unconscious mind Your answer Explanation https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 15/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Freud was very interested in "hidden" or "repressed" parts of the psyche, which he called the unconscious mind. Submitted: Show Submitted Answer This is your recorded answer from classroom or homework Show Correct Answer Check My Answer Please enter a new answer to submit. Explanation Explanation Question 1.44 Review Mark as: None Positive psychologists focus on which of the following? Select an answer and submit. For keyboard navigation, use the up/down arrow keys to select an answer. a How to treat psychological disorders b Improving human functioning and the positive side of human nature Your answer c The positive aspects of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis d Making clients feel at ease and putting the client at the center of the therapeutic experience Explanation Positive psychologists are interested in understanding and improving upon the best aspects of humanity, virtues including but not limited to kindness, generosity, and ethical behavior. Submitted: Show Submitted Answer This is your recorded answer from classroom or homework Show Correct Answer Check My Answer Please enter a new answer to submit. Explanation Explanation Loading... 1.3.3.2 The Humanists and Positive Psychology While Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis dominated the clinical landscape for the beginning of the twentieth century, all members of the growing mental health community did not readily accept them. Freud’s development of psychoanalysis was greatly influenced by his understanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory, which led him to focus on “base” unconscious urges related to sexual frustration and aggression. This unflattering portrait of human nature, the arguably sexist assumptions of some of his theories, and his assertion that people are generally powerless to do anything to address their unconscious urges without extensive analysis did not sit well with many clinicians. By the mid-twentieth century, a growing number of critics of psychoanalysis, including Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, had unified under the banner of humanistic psychology. A response to Freud’s dark view of the human condition and behaviorism’s focus on mechanistic behavior, humanistic psychology proposes that people have free will and the capacity to realize their own potential. Further, it focuses on positive aspects of the human condition, including creativity, choice, and the potential for growth. By shifting the focus away from the unconscious mind and onto the capacity for change, humanistic psychologists aimed to give control back to their clients. Rogers and Maslow were two of the most influential humanists, with Rogers' (1951) person-centered approach to therapy refocusing the clinical environment on the needs of the client rather than the expertise of the clinician. In person-centered therapy, the role of the therapist is to support and listen, in contrast to a psychoanalyst’s need to analyze and direct; this shift continues to be seen in many therapeutic settings today. Abraham Maslow (see Figure 1.22) similarly reconstructed Freud’s view of human nature, choosing to emphasize the internal driving force for humans to satisfy their basic needs for survival. He went further than Freud, however—once basic needs are met, Maslow (1943) believed that people are motivated to fulfill their psychological needs and ultimately strive for self-actualization, which is an ideal state of reaching one’s fullest potential. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 16/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Figure 1.22: Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). More recently, psychologist Martin Seligman has created a renewed interest in studying the more positive aspects of the human condition through his focus on what he has termed positive psychology. Positive psychology is a branch of psychology focused not on what can go wrong with human functioning (as is the case with much of clinical psychology), but instead on studying how humans flourish and how positive outcomes can be achieved (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Recently, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman (2004) have worked together to create a classification of character strengths and virtues that is designed to complement classifications of mental illness and dysfunction. Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Mini-lecture by Dr. Kousaie: Loading... 1.4 Modern Approaches to Psychology While the movements of the past continue to influence modern thought on psychology, today’s psychologists are generally more likely to identify with the kinds of work they do rather than the approaches they adopt. Further, most psychologists reject the notion that there is one “true” way to study or practice psychology and instead acknowledge that different schools of thought can offer different insights and strengths. Considering the effectiveness of different theoretical approaches has become especially prevalent in clinical settings as scientific evidence continues to accumulate about what kinds of therapies are most effective for different types of mental illness and other clinical populations. Choosing the most effective therapeutic technique given the present circumstances is known as an eclectic approach. (“Eclectic” means that ideas are taken from a variety of sources.) As discussed earlier, therapies rooted in the analysis of behavior can be quite effective for improving outcomes for people with autism, but other clinical issues can require a therapist to analyze the client’s history more thoroughly and assist the client in dealing with past traumas or difficulties. For psychologists interested in research, much of the recent focus in psychology has been in terms of levels of explanation rather than the development of an all- encompassing approach. The following sections first describe these levels of explanation and then go on to discuss four different modern approaches to issues in psychology, each of which offers a unique and important perspective. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 17/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote 1.4.1 Ultimate and Proximate Explanations For any psychological phenomenon, there are multiple ways of explaining its cause. A primary way to divide these levels of explanation is in terms of ultimate and proximate explanations, a tradition that began in biology (Ariew, 2003; Mayr, 1961; Scott-Phillips et al., 2011). As we have seen throughout this chapter, biological theories have significantly influenced the development of psychology, with Darwin’s theory of evolution playing a large role in the conception of both functionalism and psychoanalysis. Ultimate explanations attempt to address the reasons why a psychological phenomenon occurs by appealing to its role in the process of evolution. A now-classic example of the distinction between ultimate and proximate explanations in human behavior is the many ways in which we can attempt to explain why babies cry (Zeifman, 2001). An ultimate explanation of crying appeals to its evolutionary role: crying is a signal to caregivers that the infant needs care of some kind. In other words, the “crying as a signal to caregivers” explanation provides the ultimate reason for why crying occurs. In contrast, proximate explanations attempt to describe an immediate cause of a psychological phenomenon. Proximate explanations of infants’ crying would include both specific, functional reasons (such as getting a caregiver to provide food) as well as explanations that appeal to specific mental or physical processes (such as the experience of fear or the activation of biological systems that cause tears to well up in the eyes). For our purposes, it is useful to divide proximate explanations further based on the types just described: functional explanations and process- oriented explanations. Functional explanations are proximate explanations that seek to identify a specific problem as the cause of a psychological phenomenon, such as getting a caregiver to provide food or remove a painful object in our crying example. Process-oriented explanations are proximate explanations that focus on how a specific mental or physical process explains a psychological phenomenon, such as how crying is the result of biological processes happening in the tear duct. Figure 1.23: Why do babies cry? Well, it depends on what you mean by “why.” Ultimate and proximate explanations are complementary in nature, as they explain different aspects of the same phenomena. Generally, knowing the ultimate explanation (the “evolutionary function”) for a phenomenon in psychology helps us make predictions about its proximate explanations, including specific situational functions for the phenomenon and the mental and physical processes involved in its execution (Nairne, 2015; although see Laland et al., 2011). It is important to note that not all phenomena in psychology are products of evolution— these phenomena do not have truly ultimate explanations (as ultimate explanations must be rooted in evolutionary theory) and instead have only functional or process- oriented explanations. For example, some psychologists believe that motion sickness is simply a byproduct of how our nervous systems happen to be arranged: our balancing circuitry and our vomiting circuitry just happen to be close together (Golding, 2016). Because this explanation for motion sickness stems from the arrangement of the nervous system (a process-oriented explanation) and not the functional or evolutionary purpose of motion sickness, no functional or ultimate explanation is necessary. Psychologists today are concerned with addressing these different levels of explanation and understanding how they work with and inform one another. To this end, psychologists study the evolutionary influences, cultural influences, biological influences, and cognitive influences on behavior and mind. Loading... 1.4.2 Evolutionary Influences We have touched on the influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution repeatedly throughout this chapter. While evolutionary theory had a great deal of influence on the development of psychology, its influence waned in the middle part of the twentieth century because of attacks on the theory itself and its cultural and scientific relevance to human behavior. In particular, observations that some of the behaviors that people and animals exhibit appear to actually hurt one’s chances for survival and reproduction rather than help it were problematic for understanding how behavior is influenced by evolution. For example, how does helping someone else (altruism) improve your own ability to survive and reproduce? Why would a mother sacrifice her life for that of her children? Don’t rising obesity rates imply that our eating patterns are maladaptive? The rise of behaviorism coincided with evolution's loss of influence, and many psychologists decided to simply study how the environment shaped behavior rather than try to appeal to any kind of ultimate explanation. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 18/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote As the science of psychology and biology progressed, however, some psychologists and biologists returned to the evolutionary study of behavior—particularly those behaviors that seemed inexplicable by evolution. The discovery of DNA and genetic transfer revolutionized the way biologists understand evolution. While natural selection was originally thought to act primarily on individuals and their traits, the study of genetics allowed scientists to treat individual genes as the unit of selection instead (Dawkins, 1976). Although behaviors are rarely the result of a single gene, when the focus of evolution and natural selection is reoriented to the genetic level, some of the behaviors that were originally inexplicable become understandable. For example, helping others is not necessarily immediately beneficial to the individual, but altruism can be a highly adaptive trait in animals that are extremely social, like humans (Hamilton, 1964; Trivers, 1971). Figure 1.24: Why do we help others if it doesn’t benefit ourselves? Gene-based perspectives of helping behavior can account for seemingly paradoxical behaviors such as altruism. Another realization was that in order to understand a behavior completely, its context must be considered as well. Behaviors that appear maladaptive today may not always have been so: A preference for sweet foods may lead to an increased incidence of diabetes in today’s world of fast food and high fructose corn syrup, but it was likely useful throughout much of humanity’s evolutionary past. Fruits and other sweet food are calorie dense and important sources of nutrients for many apes and other animals. Further, it’s important to recognize that not all behaviors necessarily have an evolutionary origin, as we’ve already discussed (Gould, 1991; Gould & Lewontin, 1979). Writing and written language is an excellent example. While the mental and physical processes involved in language and communication almost certainly have evolutionary origins (Chomsky, 1986), it is difficult to say the same for written forms of language. While writing is certainly functional and serves important uses in society, it is likely just a useful combination of verbal and motor skills rather than its own unique genetic creation. Some psychologists today continue to apply the theory of evolution to psychology, searching for ultimate explanations of psychological phenomena. This approach to psychology is known as evolutionary psychology, and it strives to explain how mental processes and behavior have developed over the course of evolutionary history. Evolutionary psychologists often encounter resistance for their claims, because it is incredibly difficult to gather definitive evidence for ultimate explanations—there are no fossilized mental processes or behaviors to collect and analyze. Still, many evolutionary psychologists persist by attempting to accumulate evidence for adaptation from a variety of sources to support their claims. Others, such as James Nairne (2015), attempt to flip the process on its head by first identifying adaptive problems humans would have had to solve, and then proposing ways to test for mental processes that solve these problems. For example, Nairne and his colleagues hypothesized that information about people and animals would likely be more important to remember than information about non-living things and have collected data that support their position (Nairne et al., 2017). As a final thought exercise, let's consider psychological processes relevant to a timely topic: The coronavirus pandemic. If we are interested in protecting human health, we might consider how humans have coped with disease from an evolutionary standpoint to see if these coping strategies can be leveraged to help in the current crisis. For example, humans have what's called a "behavioral immune system" -- a suite of behaviors we perform in response to environmental and emotional cues to reduce the likelihood of disease transmission (Schaller & Park, 2011). If we can adopt strategies that align well with or otherwise address the tendencies humans have developed over evolutionary time, this may be beneficial in public health crisis such as the current one. Loading... 1.4.3 Cultural Influences Humans are social beings with elaborate cultural rituals and behaviors that vary widely from place to place. It should come as no surprise then that the influence of culture on behavior and mind is an amazingly rich field of study. Psychologists refer to culture as the shared set of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and customs belonging to a specific group or community of people. These groups and communities are generally organized around a shared characteristic or set of characteristics, such as race or ethnicity, nationality, income, sexual orientation, religious identity, or even sets of ideas such as political affiliation. In the early days of psychological research, much of the focus was on https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 19/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote the attempt to uncover “psychological universals” that apply to everyone. More recently, however, psychologists have begun to consider how culture can influence behavior and mind in meaningful ways. Classically, much of the work on cultural influences in psychology focuses on development, especially the ways cultural differences and social interactions affect children as they grow (Vygotsky, 1978). Figure 1.25: Different cultures have many of the same traditions, such as street festivals and parades. But how do these traditions manifest differently across cultures? Can you think of some traditions unique to certain cultures? Generally, cultural considerations of behavior help provide us with functional explanations, describing why a behavior manifests differently based on a person’s cultural background or specific situational demands. Feminist psychology, for example, analyzes the role that gender plays in a person’s development and behaviors, appealing to cultural differences in the ways societies raise and treat men and women (Rutherford, 2010). Similar approaches exist for other cultural influences, including critical analyses of race, religion, military experience, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) issues in psychology. The American Psychological Association has 50+ divisions, many of which are devoted to these specific cultural influences and experiences (see apa.org/about/division for a full list of divisions). Of course, people belong to many of these groups simultaneously, and analyses limited to only one group may be constrained in their scope. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw was the first to propose an intersectional approach to studying issues related to culture and cultural identity, emphasizing that people are not defined by any single aspect of their identities (Crenshaw, 1989). Her original proposal related to the situation of Black women: in many critical analyses of race and gender, “Black” issues were generally only the issues Black men faced, while much of early feminist thought ignored issues faced by Black women and women of color in general. Intersectional approaches to issues in psychology emphasize the examination of how multiple social identities intersect at the level of the individual person, influencing the ways in which they experience the world. We will explore social and cultural influences in psychology thoroughly over the course of this text. Figure 1.26: Intersectional approaches to understanding cultural influences strive to understand how multiple identities all intersect on the level of the person. For example, the experiences of Black women are different from those of both White women and Black men in unique ways. Similarly, LGBT people of color have different, unique experiences compared to White LGBT people and heterosexual people of color. This photo from the Women’s March (January 21, 2017) shows how many social movements are beginning to adopt intersectional thinking. How many different cultural identities and backgrounds can you spot represented in the image? Loading... Loading... Loading... 1.4.4 Biological Influences Advances in biomedical science have also led to improvements in the ways psychologists comprehend the biological underpinnings of behavior and mind. Today, we can “peek” at mental processes as they are happening in the brain using equipment such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), allowing us to view changes in blood flow to different regions of the brain in real time as people think (see Figure 1.27). Primarily in animals, the electrical activity of different, individual brain cells can also be recorded independently using single-cell recording techniques, giving incredibly granular insight into the biological correlates of behavior and thought. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 20/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Figure 1.27: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has given psychologists much more insight into the biological processes happening in the brain during mental functioning. The image on the top shows how fMRI can be used to isolate functioning to particular regions, while the image on the bottom shows successive cross-section scans of a brain. Most research into the biological influences on psychology is informative because it provides us with insight into process-oriented explanations, specifically concerning the biological processes that are linked to behavior. These biological processes range from explaining how neuron activity relates to the specific functions of different areas of the brain to predicting what changes in brain physiology accompany various forms of mental illness, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia. Often, insight into the biological origins of behavior can help clinicians and researchers treat mental illness and develop new ways to think about its origin. Chapter 3: Biology & Neuroscience explores the biological components of psychology in detail. Loading... 1.4.5 Cognitive Influences Finally, we arrive at cognitive influences on human behavior, which are primarily process-oriented explanations about mental processes. Recall from earlier in this chapter that cognitive psychology deals with information processing, asking questions such as “How do people perceive the world around them?” and “How do people learn and remember information?” In many ways, cognitive approaches to understanding behavior seek to provide prior context for behavior in terms of experience. Where evolutionary approaches often speak to more nativist explanations of psychology, knowing about the influence of experience on behavior is useful for understanding the “nurture” component of the human experience. Cognitive psychologists often use computer-related metaphors in their models of information processing, relating the mental states and processes of the mind to analogs in computer systems. While the computer metaphor for mental processes isn’t perfect, it’s generally seen as an effective way to think about them. Cognitive approaches to understanding clinical behavior are also useful. Many clinicians believe that depression is fundamentally a disorder related to maladaptive thought patterns more than anything else: If patients can be taught how to interrupt and change their negative thoughts, then depression can be alleviated. Further, evidence shows that cognitive therapies compared to antidepressants alone (a biological intervention) may result in lower relapse rates over the long term (Gloagen, Cottrauz, Cucherat, & Blackburn, 1998), although the combination of both types of therapies is generally most effective. Finally, because learning and experience create physical changes in the structure of the brain (Hebb, 1949), we can think of cognitive and biological influences on psychology as relating to descriptions of either the mind (cognitive) or the brain (biological). Thus, cognitive approaches to psychology describe the mind that the brain is creating. Throughout this text, we will explore cognitive approaches to explaining behavior and the mind in a variety of situations. Loading... Loading... Watch the video below and answer the questions that follow. Please click here to view the full transcript of the video below entitled, “Capuchin monkey fights for equal rights - Inside the Animal Mind: Episode 3-BBC Two.” https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 21/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Mini-lecture by Dr. Kousaie: Loading... Loading... 1.5 Summary This chapter has addressed four primary areas of psychology: what it is, what psychologists do, the history of psychology, and how psychologists think today. These four areas help us build a framework for understanding each of the topics covered in the chapters of this text, as well as the modern approaches to psychology as a science. As you continue to read, consider coming back to this chapter to think about how each of the various influences in psychology informs the topics discussed in the text and what level of explanation the topics attempt to explore. Additionally, Section 1.3: The History of Psychology will be useful for you going forward, as you may be able to draw connections to other areas of psychology based on the time the research you are reading about was conducted. Good luck on your journey, and have fun exploring a world of psychological phenomena! In this chapter, you learned: Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mind and is rooted in the disciplines of philosophy and physiology. Early philosophers thought that the mind and body were separate, but modern psychologists reject this idea—the mind is understood to be “what the brain does.” There are two types of work within psychology: basic and applied. Research (both basic and applied) answers questions about psychology, while applied practice puts those answers to work solving problems in the real world. Clinical practice is a form of applied work. The difference between empiricism and nativism is whether knowledge must be learned or is innate; both are relevant to our understanding of how people understand the world around them. The theory of evolution and the concept of natural selection have been very influential in the field of psychology, shaping how we understand the function of the brain. Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany, initiating the formal scientific study of psychology. The structuralist movement in psychology sought to break down conscious experience to its most basic elements using systematic introspection, while the functionalist movement preferred to consider psychological processes in terms of their functions. William James is considered the “father of American psychology” and helped to widely popularize both psychology and functionalism in North America. The behaviorist movement in psychology discounted the study of the mind and mental processes in favor of analyzing only observable behavior; this movement helped refine and improve psychology as a science. The computer helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology, which was a return to studying mental processes (using computer processing as a metaphor for mental processing). Freud made efforts to understand the unconscious mind through psychoanalysis, a method used to treat mental disorders. The humanists preferred to consider the treatment of mental illness in terms of helping people become their best selves, contrary to Freud’s darker view of human nature. Multiple levels of explanation are often necessary when considering psychological phenomena: Ultimate explanations consider the evolutionary purpose of a phenomenon, functional explanations consider the immediate causes, and process-oriented explanations provide mechanistic explanations (e.g., biological or psychological mechanisms). https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 22/23 10/9/24, 12:48 AM OneNote Psychologists today often take an eclectic approach to understanding behavior and mind, applying various perspectives as needed; these perspectives include considering psychological phenomena evolutionarily, culturally, biologically, and cognitively. https://uottawa-my.sharepoint.com/personal/emiss090_uottawa_ca/_layouts/15/Doc.aspx?sourcedoc={ed774f1a-6ddd-44e7-b946-9b8867e1cdf6}&action=edit&wd… 23/23