Psych unit 1

• William Vunt is known as the father of psychology and created the first laboratory that was dedicated exclusively to psychology research.
• William James taught the first psychology course at harvard university and wrote the first psychology textbook.
• William James also created the theoretical approach known as functionalism and helped get more women into psychology.
• Mary Wayne Calkins joined William James' graduate seminar despite pushback from the university and other students and made significant contributions in memory research.
• Mary Wayne Calkins became the first female president of the apa.
• Charles Darwin proposed the idea of natural selection and argued that our behaviors and bodies were shaped through natural selection, reinforcing and shaping the theoretical approach known as evolutionary psychology.
• Dorothea Dix helped reshape the medical field by highlighting the unfair and inhumane treatment of mentally ill people and also helped to reform insane asylums.
• Sigmund Freud created the psychoanalytic theory which was later changed to the psychodynamic approach and focused on studying the unconscious mind and believed that people's personalities are shaped by unconscious motives.
• Ivan Pavlov focused on reflex conditioning which would later become known as classical conditioning and is most known for his experiment with dogs and their digestion.
• John Piaget was the first psychologist to conduct a systematic study of cognitive development and would eventually go on to create a theory of cognitive development focusing on children.
• Carl Rogers is one of the founders of humanistic psychology and made significant contributions to the research and understanding of people's personality.
• B.F. Skinner expanded on the theoretical approach of behavioralism and is known for operant conditioning which focuses on behaviors and positive and negative consequences.
• John B. Watson believed that psychology should be a scientific study and focus on observable things.
• Z-scores allow us to compare things that are not the same as long as they are normally distributed.
• A negative skew occurs when scores are high and are clustered to the right of the mean.
• A bimodal distribution is when the distribution has two modes causing the distribution to have two peaks.
• The standard deviation is a measure of variability that is often used in statistics.
• The percentile rank allows us to understand the percentage of scores that are at or below a particular score.
• Ethical guidelines in psychology are enforced by the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Institutional Review Board (IRB).
• The Institutional Review Board (IRB) ensures that studies and experiments in colleges and universities are set up in a way that protect everyone involved in the study.
• Experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment failed to protect participants due to not taking adequate measures to prevent physical and psychological harm which could have been avoided if the researchers did not play a double role in the experiment.
• In an experiment, participants must have adequate protection, privacy, and confidentiality.
• If the correlation coefficient is between zero and negative one, it means one variable increases while the other decreases.
• A positive skew occurs when scores are low and are clustered to the left of the mean.
• A normal distribution has a symmetrical bell-shaped curve with one mode and the mean and median located at the center of the distribution at the zero point value.
• If the correlation coefficient is between zero and one, it means the variables are either increasing or decreasing together.
• The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) is responsible for overseeing the protection of animals in studies across the country.
• If there is no correlation, it means there is no relationship between the variables and the plotted data points would be all over the place.
• Einstein bias is the tendency to think that one could have anticipated the outcome of an event or experiment after it already occurred.
• Hawthorne effect is when an individual or a participant alters their behavior because they know that they are being observed.
• Experimenter or researcher bias is when researchers unknowingly influence the outcome of the research.
• Researchers can utilize different methods to create more accurate studies and reduce bias, such as using a double-blind study or a single blind study.
• Confirmation bias is when individuals focus on only specific information that aligns with their viewpoint and ignore conflicting information.
• Researchers need to understand the data that was collected after a study or experiment, often looking at quantitative data and qualitative data.
• Descriptive statistics are used to organize and describe data that was collected, while inferential statistics are used to make predictions about their data to better determine if the data from a sample can be applied to the population.
• False consensus effect is when individuals overestimate how many others share their opinions and ideas.
• Validity in research is how well a test measures what it claims to measure.
• Social desirability or participant bias is when participants in a study skew their answers to create a more favorable impression of themselves.
• Confounding variables are other variables besides the independent variable that could impact the dependent variable, also known as the third variable problem.
• Case studies allow researchers to analyze different perspectives of a topic or a subject, often providing information in chronological order, but the data that is collected here cannot be used to generalize the population and the study may be impacted by the Hawthorne effect.