Ap psychology

• Aristotle

  Beginning of psychologist thinking
• Wilhelm Wundt


  Set up first psychology lab in 1879, measured time after hearing a sound & pressing a button
• Edward Titchener


  Student of Wundt, introduced structuralism, utilized introspection to explore mind's structural elements
• Introspection


  Examination of one's own mental & emotional process
• William James


  A functionalist, considered functions of thoughts & feelings
• Psychology


  Science of behavior & mental processes
• Behavior


  Anything an organism does
• Mental processes


  Internal experiences we infer from behavior
• Sigmund Freud


  Studied how emotional responses to childhood experiences & our unconscious affect our behavior
• Behavioural psychology


  An objective science that studies behavior with no reference to mental processes
• Humanistic psychology


  Against Freud & behavioralism, importance of current environmental influence on growth potential, needs for love & acceptance satisfied
• Cognitive neuroscience


  How we relieve, process, & remember
• Nature-nurture controversy


  Contributions of biology & experience
• Biopsychosocial approach


  Influence of biological, psychological, & social factors
• Perspectives


  • Neuroscience - brain & body enable emotions, memories, & sensory experiences
  • Evolutionary - natural selection promoted survival of genes
  • Behavioral - how we learn observable responses, behavior is learned
  • Psychodynamic - behavior springs from unconscious drives & conflicts (childhood/memories)
  • Cognitive - how we encode, process, store, & retrieve
  • Social-cultural - how behavior & thinking vary across cultures
• Waves of psychology


  • Introspection: looking within/brain - Wilhelm Wundt, structuralism
  • Gestalt psychology: the whole - Max Wertheimer, how we experience the world, whole of the experience rather than the parts
  • Psychoanalysis: unconscious - Sigmund Freud, most feelings come from unconscious
  • Behavioralism: actions - early/mid 1900s, cared how you acted, not how you felt
  • Eclectic: today, 7 perspectives to analyze situations
• Hindsight bias


  Realizing/knowing what to do after event has occurred ("I knew it all along")
• Overconfidence


  Dramatizing one's ability
• Barnum effect


  Tendency to accept general/vague characteristics of selves & take them to be accurate (horoscopes, MBTI, etc.)
• Curiosity, skepticism, & humility make science possible
• Scientific method


  1. Theory linked with observation

  2. Theory - organizes observations & predicts behaviors

  3. Hypothesis - testable predictions produced by "good" theories

  4. Operational definitions - statements of procedures used to define research variables, helps replicate study with clear predictions that are testable

  5. Confounding variables - anything that could impact the dependent variable that is not due to the independent variable

  6. Random sampling - everyone equal chance of participation, makes results unbiased

  7. Wording effect - different wording holds different impacts on people
• Case study


  • Observation technique - one person studied in depth to reveal universal principles
• Naturalistic observation


  • Watching subjects in natural environment
• Correlation


  How one trait is related to another (inverse, direct, & relation)
• Correlation coefficient


  r (ranges from -1 to 1)
• correlation is not causation
• Illusory correlation


  Non-existent trend (only has association - think dangers of bread)
• Standard deviation


  Measures distance of a score from the mean
• Statistical significance


  Probability that results are due to chance, less varying observations = reliable data set
• Inferential statistics


  Discover whether findings can be applied to larger population, p-value < 0.05 for statistical significance
• Hawthorne/Observer effect


  If people know they are being studied, they don't act natural
• Experimenter bias/Expectancy effect


  Experimenter looks for certain effects
• Psychologists use animals for research because of biological & behavioral similarities, animals can use selective breeding to create controls in animal experimentation, unethical experiments on humans may be ethical on animals
• American Psychological Association created ethical guidelines in 1993 for informed consent, right to be protected from harm, confidentiality, and debriefing