PSYCH 1020H Introduction to Psychology I Notes PDF

Psychology Philosophical Roots What is Psychology? The study of the mind and behavior. ❖ Mind = Private events ❖ Behavior = The things we say and do The things we say or do, do not always match what is occurring inside our mind (making it difficult for psychologists to interpret our thoughts)....

Psychology Philosophical Roots What is Psychology? The study of the mind and behavior. ❖ Mind = Private events ❖ Behavior = The things we say and do The things we say or do, do not always match what is occurring inside our mind (making it difficult for psychologists to interpret our thoughts). Dualism vs. Materialism Rene Descartes (1596-1650): French philosopher who argued for dualism of mind and body. ❖ Dualism = The mind and body are fundamentally different things Our physical body is just a container for a nonphysical thing (the mind) The body and mind are not connected Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): Argued against Descartes, and said that the mind is what the brain does. ❖ Materialism = The mind and body are connected The body acts more than a container Everything we think, hear, etc., is all because of the brain Realism vs. Idealism John Locke (1632-1704): English philosopher who argued that there is a real world. ❖ Realism = Our perception of our world is not in the eye of the beholder The brain is taking information from our sensory organs, and our brain is using it to produce perceptions around us Reality exists independently Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Suggested that Locke’s theory was too simplistic. ❖ Idealism = Reality is a combination of our brain's sensory organs and our own brain’s personal interpretation We use the information we already have to incorporate the information we have received Our experience cannot be separated from our mind Empiricism vs. Nativism Empiricism (Locke) = All knowledge is acquired through experience ❖ Born as a blank slate, tabula rasa Nativism (Kant) = Some knowledge is innate rather than acquired The World's First Psychology Laboratory → Moving Away From Philosophy to Psychology Hermann von Helmholtz was interested in reaction time. ❖ If you tapped someone on the toe it would take them longer to react than if you tapped them on the thigh ❖ He realized that this had something to do with how quickly our nerves transmit neurons Wilhem Wundt opened the world's first psychology laboratory in 1879. ❖ Structuralism = Tried to break down the mind’s basic elements Wundt’s student Edawrd Titchener developed the technique called introspection. ❖ Introspection = The analysis of subjective experience by trained observers ❖ He trained people to report on their raw experiences, not their interpretations John Dewey and James Angell, developed an approach that contradicted Wundt’s structuralism. ❖ Functionalism = The mind is a functional tool that allows us to adapt to our environment Our mental states and behavior are survival mechanisms, in line with our inherent biological goals One historian wrote that functionalism inherited its body from experimentalism, but got its mind from Darwin. ❖ Natural Selection = The process by which the specific attributes that promote an organism’s survival and reproduction becomes more prevalent in a population over time Psychoanalysis Freud was a physician who developed the notion that people have an unconscious mind. A part of our mind where there is information that we don’t have access to. ❖ Psychoanalytic Theory = A general theory that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on feelings, thoughts, and behaviors ❖ Psychoanalysis = A therapy that aims to give people insight into the contents of their unconscious mind French physicians Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet created the term hysteria, which essentially states that a loss of a function that has no obvious physical origin. Behaviourism Behaviourists believed that the mind didn’t really matter at all, and to understand others we need to observe them, externally. John Watson believed that if psychology was believed to be a real science, we needed to focus on what we do (based on Pavlov). ❖ Behaviourism = An approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behavior B.F. Skinner challenged the works of Watson and Pavolv. The environment still needed to be explored. ❖ He developed the ‘Skinner Box’, which essentially was a cage for rats that had a lever which if pulled brought food (looked at the concept of rewards) ❖ The Principle of Reinforcement = A principle stating that any behavior is rewarded will be repeated and any behavior that is not rewarded will not be repeated Some psychologists still believed that it was possible for two people to see the same physical stimuli, but to ‘see’ different things. ❖ Gestalt Theory = An approach to psychology that emphasized the way in which the mind creates perceptual experience For example, showing people the same image and them interpreting different things ❖ Developmental Psychology = The study of the ways in which psychological phenomena change over the lifespan Social, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Psychology Interested in the way we interact with one another, like communication, leadership, prejudice. Perhaps the way we respond is not dependent on that stimuli, but how we think about the stimuli. ❖ Social Psychology = The study of the cause and consequences of sociality Cognitive Psychology = The study of human information processing. ❖ Cognitive psychologists study how human beings process information and focus on areas such as attention, memory and more Evolutionary Psychology = The study of the ways in which the human mind has been shaped by natural selection. ❖ There seems to be some associations that are easier for us to make than others, and evolutionary psychologists believe that this has to do with biological preparedness Cognitive Neuroscience = The study of the relationship between the brain and the mind. Behavioural Neuroscience = The study of the relationship between the brain and behavior. Cultural Psychology Psychologists recognize that there are differences in culture, more recently that cultural differences can have a profound influence on our mental life. ❖ Culture: The values, traditions, and beliefs that are shared by a particular group of people Nationality, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, occupation ❖ Cultural Psychology = The study of how culture influences our mental life Research and Ethics Scientific method keeps us rooted in the hard sciences. It is a set of principles about the appropriate relationship between ideas using empirical evidence, used to establish facts. ❖ Empiricism = Belief that accurate knowledge can be acquire through observation; essential element in the scientific method Empirical method: A set of rules and techniques for observation In the scientific method you have an idea about something, you create a theory based on research, give a hypothetical explanation, and finally, create a hypothesis. ❖ Theory = Hypothetical explanation of a natural phenomena, ‘ideas about how something works’ ❖ Hypothesis = Falsifiable prediction made by a theory, ‘should’ statement Construct Validity = Extent to which the thing being measured adequately characterizes the property. Features of a good detector: ❖ Reliability = Tendency for a measure to produce the same measurement whenever it is used to measure the same thing (amount) ❖ Power = Ability of a measure to detect conditions specified by operational definition (difference) Define the property (generate an operational definition that has construct validity) → detect the property (design an instrument that has reliability and power). What affects the reliability of our data? 1. Precision of data collecting/scoring 2. The state of the participant 3. The state and experience of the experimenter 4. The variation in the environment Validity = Reliability is necessary, but not sufficient. The degree to which a measurement actually reflects what one thinks or hopes it does. Psychologists typically have two general concepts for describing data. ❖ Graphic representation Frequencies Normal distribution ❖ Descriptive statistics Mean: The average score Median: The score of the middle case Mode: The most common score Variability is understanding the spread of our data, to the extent that measurements differ. ❖ Range = The value of the largest measurements in a frequency distribution minus the value of the smallest measurement ❖ Standard Deviation = Statistic that describes the average difference between the measurements in a frequency distribution and the mean of the distribution Dispersion = The greater the dispersion of a variable, the greater the range of scores and the greater the difference between scores. Skew = When a frequency distribution is normal, the mean, median, and mode all have the same value, but when it is positively skewed, these three measures of central tendency have quite different values. Correlational = Use correlations to establish the relationship between two variables. ❖ We measure both variables of a sample of participants ❖ We can see how these two variables are related Experimental Design = A research technique that establishes a causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable by randomly assigning participants to experimental groups characterized by differing levels of x, and measuring the average behavior y that results in each group.