Chapter 1 Psychology

• Psychology


  The scientific study of the mind and behavior
• Logos


  Study of the subject
• Psychology is as old as the human race
• Psychology emerged as a scientific discipline

  150 years ago
• Psychology's parents


  • Physiology
  • Philosophy
• Wilhelm Wundt


  Founder of psychology, established a psychology research laboratory at the University of Leipzig (Germany) in 1879
• Consciousness


  Awareness of immediate experience
• Structuralism


  Psychology is to analyse consciousness into its basic elements and to investigate how these elements are related
• Structuralists


  • Explored perception in vision, hearing and touch
  • Depended on the method of introspection (careful, systematic self-observation of one's own conscious experience)
• Functionalism


  Psychology should investigate the function or purpose of consciousness rather than its structure
• Functionalists


  • Investigated mental testing, patterns of development in children, effectiveness in educational practices, behavioural differences between the sexes
• Functionalism helped in promoting the development of behaviourism and applied psychology
• Sigmund Freud

  Austrian physicist, developed psychoanalytic theory to explain personality, motivation and mental disorders by focusing on unconscious determinants of behaviour
• Unconscious


  Contains thoughts, memories and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness, but still have a great influence on behaviour
• Behaviourism


  A theoretical orientation based on the concept that scientific psychology should study only observable behaviour
• Behaviourism


  • Abandoned the study of consciousness, focused exclusively on observable behaviours, used scientific method based on verifiability and objectivity
• B.F. Skinner


  Maintained that internal mental events cannot be studied scientifically, argued that all behaviour is governed by external stimuli and the environment, and that free will is an illusion
• Humanism


  A theoretical orientation that emphasises the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth
• Humanists


  • Take an optimistic view of human nature, maintain that people are not pawns of either their animal heritage or their environmental circumstances, and that human behaviour is governed primarily by each individual's sense of self or 'self-concept'
• Psychology eventually matured into a research-based science
• Clinical psychology


  The branch of psychology concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of psychological problems and disorders
• After World War II, many academic psychologists were pressed into service as clinicians, leading to a funding increase in psychology training programs
• Cognition


  The mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge, including thinking and conscious experience
• The cognitive approach has become the dominant perspective in contemporary psychology
• The biological perspective maintains that much of human and animal behaviour can be explained in terms of brain structures and biochemical processes
• Most psychologists have worked under the assumptions of finding general principles of behaviour applicable to all of humanity, but psychology is largely a Western initiative with a limited cultural perspective
• Cognition


  Thinking or conscious experience
• Cognitive theorists


  • Psychology must include the study of internal mental events to fully understand human behaviour
• Cognitive perspective


  • Our mental processes influence how we behave
• Cognitive approach


  • Dominant perspective in contemporary psychology
• Biological perspective


  • Much of human and animal behaviour can be explained in terms of the brain structures and biochemical processes that allow organisms to behave
• Most psychologists have worked under the assumptions of finding general principles of behaviour that would be applicable to all of humanity
• Psychology is largely a Western initiative with a rather provincial slant
• Western psychologists have paid adequate attention how their theories may affect the non-Western people and cultures
• The neglect of cultural variables had made their work less valuable
• They pay more attention to culture as determinant of behaviour to make their work more valuable
• Recent trends that increased interest in culture


  • Advanced in communication, travel and international trade have shrunk the world and increased global interdependence
  • Ethnic makeup of Western world has become increasingly diverse and multicultural
• Evolutionary psychology


  Examines behavioural processes in terms of their adaptive value for members of a species over the course of many generations
• Basic principle of evolutionary psychology


  Selection favours behaviours that improve organism's reproductive success
• Evolutionary psychology emerged in the middle to late 1980s