Psychology

• Psychology


  The study of the mind
• What is psychology?


  • Counselling
  • Personality
  • Understanding behavior to solve crimes
  • Science
  • Mental illness
  • The unconscious
• Psychology


  The scientific study of behavior and mental processes
• Mind


  Originates in the brain and fosters human consciousness
• Behavior


  Any observable action/any response carried out by an organism
• Mental processes


  Internal processes that occur within an individual/activities in the brain that are required to produce a sequence of systematic actions, changes and functions
• Philosophy


  Discipline that systematically examines basic concepts including sources of knowledge, reason, existence, values, mind, and language
• Natural science (Physiology)


  Science that studies physical and biological events that occur
• Wundt


  German physiologist & father of psychology, set up first psychological laboratory in Germany in 1879, research focused on attention, memory, sensory processes and reaction-time experiments
• Wundt


  • Believed psychology should be a science, based on the principles used in chemistry and physics
  • Interested in people's immediate or closest experience, and tried to develop ways to study it scientifically
• Structuralism


  An approach in which the mind is broken down into the smallest elements of mental experience, seeks to identify and examine the fundamental components of conscious experience (Sensation, images and feelings), used introspection to examine consciousness
• Functionalism


  An approach that sees behavior as purposeful and contributing to survival, instead of focusing on the structure (consciousness), what is its function or purpose?
• Functionalism


  • Emerged as a response to Charles Darwin's evolutionary perspective and natural selection
  • Interested in why behaviour and mental processes worked in a particular way
  • Views behaviour as purposeful because it leads to survival
• Psychodynamic theory


  Sigmund Freud's theory that human beings are not as rational as we think, and that we are all motivated by primitive sexual and aggressive drives, forbidden wishes and fears that we are not aware of (the unconscious)
• Freud


  • Believed these unconscious drives influence our conscious mind and are expressed in forms we do not recognize like the "slip of the tongue", "dreams" and "symptoms of mental illness"
  • Developed a technique called "free association" to help recognize what is in the mind
• Behaviorism


  An approach to psychology that features the study and careful management of observable behavior, based on the principle that organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes, and they tend not to repeat responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes
• Behaviorism


  • Questioned whether the study of consciousness using self-observation could be considered scientific study
  • Believed that the study of psychology should only be the study of observable behaviour
• Classical/Pavlovian conditioning


  The ability of organisms to use learned associations to anticipate important future events
• Operant conditioning


  The idea that organisms tend to repeat behavior that have satisfying results, and when an action produces good results (consequences), that particular behavior is reinforced and repeated
• Humanistic Psychology/Humanism


  An approach that sees people to be inherently good and are motivated to learn and improve, emphasizes that people have unique qualities and a fundamental drive toward personal growth
• Humanistic Psychology


  • Came into being as a result of the dissatisfaction with prevailing views (Freud, James and behaviorists) that human behavior was on a continuum with animal behavior and that humans are innately uncivilized
  • Rejected the idea that people are innately uncivilized and must be taught to be good, believed people are innately good and only behave badly when corrupted by society
• Client-centered therapy


  Developed by Carl Rogers, emphasizes the equal standing of the client with the therapist and the client's active role in the therapy process
• Client-centered therapy


  • Rogers argued that human behavior is governed primarily by each individual's sense of self or self-concept, and that to fully understand people's behavior, we must consider the fundamental human drive towards personal growth
• Evolutionary psychology


  A special part of Biological psychology that attempts to answer how our physical structure and behavior has been shaped by their contributions to our species' survival
• Humanist revolt


  They extended the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century Romantic philosophers into a belief that people are innately good, motivated to improve themselves, and only behave badly when corrupted by society
• Client-centered therapy


  Clients have equal standing with the therapist and an active role in the therapy process
• Rogers' view


  Human behavior is governed primarily by each individual's sense of self or self-concept
• Maslow and Rogers' view


  To fully understand people's behavior, we must consider the fundamental human drive towards personal growth
• Evolutionary psychology


  • Studying our good memory for faces, particularly faces of people who have cheated us in the past
• Perspective in psychology


  A specialized area of expertise that aids in understanding psychological phenomena better
• Research areas in psychology

  • Developmental psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Educational psychology
  • Health psychology
  • Physiological psychology/Psychophysiology
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Psychometrics
  • Personality
• Psychology has always been a Western discipline, with research largely conducted by white (middle-to-upper class) psychologists
• Beginning of modern psychology in South Africa, when former Prime Minister Jan Smuts produced first completed manuscript "An inquiry into the whole"


  1910
• Between 1917 and the 1930s, academic psychology and psychometry gained momentum in South Africa, due to the works of E.G. Malherbe and the founder of the first independent department of psychology at the University of Stellenbosch
• Psychoanalysis developed in South Africa, and I.D. MacCrone published a seminal piece on the psychoanalytic explanation of racial conflict
• Wulf Sachs (Student of Pavlov), Gordon Allport (Inspired by Philosopher R. Hoernle & Fritz Perls), and Perls (who worked closely with Joseph Wolp and was associated with Systematic desensitisation) were influential in South African psychology
• Perls' work established South Africa to be a major contributor to the development of behavior therapy
• The release of Mandela sparked a new revolution in South African psychology, and Thabo Mbeki's speech in Parliament developed Mandela's concept of freedom and paved the way for psychological engagement of freedom and pride
• Due to language differences, training facilities and applied practices, variations in the development of psychology exist across sub-Saharan countries
• Formal training in psychology has a history in South Africa, and theory and practice are like international developments