Chapter 1

• Psychology


  The science of behavior and the mind
• Behavior


  • Observable actions of a person
• Mind


  • Individual's sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotions, and other subjective experiences
  • Unconscious knowledge and operating rules built into or stored in the brain that provide the foundation for organizing behavior and conscious experience
• Science


  All attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical analysis of objectively
• Psychology exists for one sole higher purpose: TO UPLIFT THE HUMAN CONDITION
• Goals of psychology

  • Describe
  • Explain
  • Predict
  • Control
• Describe behavior


  Accurately share certain phenomenon which involves classification of data into meaningful categories, either qualitatively or quantitatively
• Explain behavior


  Assemble known facts, gain insights into the relationships among observable behaviors, and derive principles and models that will explain behavior
• Predict behavior


  Use past performances as basis to predict future behaviors
• Control behavior


  Ensure the best possible outcomes
• Fundamental ideas of psychology


  • Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied scientifically
  • The way people behave, think, and feel is modified over time by their experiences in their environment
  • The body's machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences, is a product of evolution by natural selection
• Physical causation of behavior


  Behavior and the mind have a physical basis, they are open to study just like the rest of the natural world
• Role of experience


  All thought and knowledge are rooted in sensory experience<|>Some knowledge is innate and provides the foundation for human nature, including the human abilities to learn
• Evolutionary basis of mind and behavior

  Natural selection underlies the evolution of behavioral tendencies that promote survival and reproduction
• Major philosophical issues in psychology

  • Free will versus determinism
  • Mind-brain problem
  • Nature-nurture issue
• Determinism


  The idea that everything that happens has a cause or determinant, that someone could observe or measure
• Free will


  The belief that behavior is caused by a person's independent decisions
• Dualism


  Holds that the mind is separate from the brain but somehow controls the brain and therefore the rest of the body
• Monism


  The view that conscious experience is inseparable from the physical brain
• Nature-nurture issue


  How do differences in behavior relate to differences in heredity and environment?
• Wilhelm Wundt


  • Interested in studying mental experiences
  • Introspection - an attempt to directly study consciousness by having people report on what they are consciously experiencing
• Edward Titchener


  • Brought Wundt's teachings and methods of introspection to the United States
  • Structuralism - an approach that attempts to define the structure of the mind by breaking down mental experiences into their component parts
• Wilhelm Wundt opened the first university-based psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany


  1879
• The first American to work in Wundt's experimental laboratory was the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. In 1892, Hall founded the American Psychological Association (APA), now the largest organization of psychologists in the United States
• William James


  • Founded functionalism, the school of psychology that focused on how behavior helps individuals adapt to demands placed upon them in the environment
  • Whereas structuralists were concerned with understanding the structure of the human mind, functionalists were concerned with the functions of mental processes
• John Broadus Watson


  • Behaviorism - promotes that psychology should limit itself to the study of overt behavior that observers could record and measure
  • Reasoned that because you can never observe another person's mental processes, psychology would never advance as a science unless it eliminated mentalistic concepts like mind, consciousness, thinking, and feeling
  • Believed that the environment molds the behavior of humans and other animals
• BF Skinner


  • Studied how behavior is shaped by rewards and punishments, the environmental consequences that follow specific responses
• Max Wertheimer


  • Gestalt psychology - the school of psychology that studies ways in which the brain organizes and structures our perceptions of the world
  • Rejected the structuralist belief that mental experience could be understood by breaking it down into its component parts
  • "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" - brain organizes our perceptions of the world by grouping elements together into unified or organized wholes, rather than as individual bits and pieces of sense experience
• Sigmund Freud


  • Conceived of the unconscious as the repository of primitive sexual and aggressive drives or instincts and of the wishes, impulses, and urges that arise from those drives or instincts
  • Believed that the motives underlying our behavior involve sexual and aggressive impulses that lie in the unconscious, hidden away from our ordinary awareness of ourselves
  • The development of personality is mostly influenced by the events of early childhood
  • Bringing information from the unconscious in the consciousness can lead to catharsis and allow people to deal with the issue
• Unconscious


  Repository of primitive sexual and aggressive drives or instincts and of the wishes, impulses, and urges that arise from those drives or instincts
• Freud's view of the unconscious


  • Primitive sexual and aggressive drives or instincts
  • Wishes, impulses, and urges that arise from those drives or instincts
• Personality development


  Largely influenced by the events of early childhood, largely set in stone by age 5
• Catharsis


  Bringing information from the unconscious into consciousness can lead to catharsis and allow people to deal with the issue
• Defense mechanisms


  People utilize a number of defense mechanisms to protect themselves from information contained in the unconscious
• Emotional and psychological problems


  Often rooted in conflicts between the conscious and unconscious mind
• Psychoanalytic strategies


  Dream analysis and free association
• Contemporary perspectives continue to evolve and shape our understanding of behavior
• Scientific method


  Framework for acquiring knowledge based on careful observation and the use of experimental methods
• Steps in the scientific method

  1. Developing a research question

  2. Framing the research question as a hypothesis

  3. Gathering evidence to test the hypothesis

  4. Drawing conclusions about the hypothesis
• Informed consent


  Participants must be given enough information about the study's methods and purposes to make an informed decision about whether they wish to participate, and must be free to withdraw at any time