psyc121 chap 1

• Psychology


  The scientific investigation of mental processes (thinking, remembering and feeling) and behaviour
• Understanding a person


  • Requires attention to the individual's biology, psychological experience and cultural context
• Positive psychology


  Focuses on understanding and harnessing positive emotions and actively stimulating conditions that produce valued, subjective experiences that help people flourish
• Psychology seeks to answer questions about why we do the things we do
• Humans are complex creatures whose psychological experience lies at the intersection of biology and culture
• Biopsychology (or behavioural neuroscience)

  Investigates the physical basis of psychological phenomena such as memory, emotion and stress
• The connection between brain and behaviour became increasingly clear during the nineteenth century, when doctors began observing patients with severe head injuries
• Behavioural neuroscientists


  Doctors or biologists rather than psychologists who investigate the electrical and chemical processes in the nervous system that underlie mental events
• Behavioural neuroscientists aim to link mind and body, psyche and brain
• Connection between brain and behaviour

  • Became increasingly clear during the nineteenth century when doctors began observing patients with severe head injuries
  • These patients often showed deficits in language and memory, or dramatic changes in their personality
• Lesion experiments on animals

  1. Producing lesions surgically in different neural regions to observe the effects on behaviour

  2. Still used in contemporary science, as in research on emotion
• Lesions in brain structures hypothesised to be involved when primates learned to fear aversive stimuli altered the emotional display of the primates
• Localisation of function


  The extent to which different parts of the brain control different aspects of functioning
• Discoveries linking specific language functions to specific regions of the left hemisphere


  • Lesions on the left side of the brain associated with aphasia (language disorders)
  • Broca's area involved in difficulty producing speech
  • Wernicke's area involved in difficulty comprehending language
• Contemporary neuroscientists no longer believe that complex psychological functions 'happen' exclusively in a single localised part of the brain
• The circuits for psychological events, such as emotions or thoughts, are distributed throughout the brain, with each part contributing to the total experience
• Technological advances have allowed researchers to pinpoint lesions precisely and watch computerised portraits of the brain light up with activity as people perform psychological tasks
• Psychology has become increasingly biological over the last decade, as behavioural neuroscience has extended into virtually all areas of psychology
• Introspection


  The process of looking inward and reporting on one's conscious experience
• Wundt's introspection


  • Trained observers to report verbally everything that went through their minds when presented with a stimulus or task
  • Varied the objects presented to conclude that the basic elements of consciousness are sensations and feelings
• Wundt never identified experimentation as the only route to psychological knowledge
• Wundt considered experimentation essential for studying the basic elements of the mind, but other methods were essential for understanding higher mental processes
• Structuralism


  School of thought initiated by Wundt's student Edward Titchener, focused on the structure of consciousness
• Titchener's structuralism


  • Believed experimentation was the only appropriate method for a science of psychology
  • Viewed the study of consciousness itself as unscientific
• Functionalism


  School of thought that emphasised the role or function of psychological processes in helping individuals adapt to their environment
• Functionalism


  • Focused on explaining, not simply describing, the mind's contents
  • Influenced by Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory
• Structuralism and functionalism were two early 'camps' in psychology that attracted passionate advocates and opponents
• Paradigm


  A broad system of theoretical assumptions that a scientific community uses to make sense of its domain of study
• Psychology lacks an accepted paradigm upon which most members of the scientific community agree
• Perspectives in psychology


  • Psychodynamic
  • Behaviourist
  • Humanistic
  • Cognitive
  • Evolutionary
• Psychodynamic perspective


  Focuses on the dynamic interplay of mental forces, many of which occur outside of conscious awareness, and how they lead to compromises among competing motives
• Psychodynamic perspective


  • People's actions are determined by the way thoughts, feelings and wishes are connected in their minds
  • Many mental events occur outside of conscious awareness
  • Mental processes may conflict with one another, leading to compromises among competing motives
• Psychodynamic concepts, such as ideas about unconscious processes, remained outside the mainstream of psychology until brought into the laboratory by contemporary researchers
• Unconscious motives


  Powerful unconscious motives that underlie people's conscious intentions and behaviours
• Unconscious motives


  • Feeling an unconscious excitement or morbid curiosity from viewing a gruesome accident scene, even if consciously denying such feelings
• Most psychological processes occur outside of awareness and many associations between feelings, behaviours and situations that guide behaviour are expressed implicitly or unconsciously
• Case study method


  In-depth observation of a small number of people, used by psychodynamic psychologists to interpret meanings and infer underlying wishes, fears and patterns of thought
• Psychodynamic psychologists have typically relied primarily on clinical data to support their theories, which has led to scepticism from other psychologists
• In recent years, researchers have been subjecting psychodynamic ideas to experimental tests and trying to integrate them with the body of scientific knowledge in psychology
• Psychodynamic psychologists have typically relied primarily on clinical data to support their theories