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• Psychology


  The science of behavior and the mind
• Behavior

  • Observable actions of a person
• Mind


  • Individual's emotions, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, 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 systematic collection and logical analysis
• Psychology exists for one sole higher purpose: To uplift the human condition by understanding people and developing ways to make their lives better
• Purposes of Psychology

  • Describe behavior
  • Explain behavior
  • Predict behavior
  • Control behavior
• Physical causation of behavior


  Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied scientifically
• Role of experience


  The way people behave, think, and feel is modified over time by their experiences in their environment
• Evolutionary basis of mind and behavior


  The body's machinery that produces behavior and mental experiences is a product of evolution by natural selection
• Major philosophical issues in Psychology

  • Free will vs. 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


  The view 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 (mind and brain are the same thing)
• Nature-Nurture Issue


  How do differences in behavior relate to differences in heredity and environment?
• Schools of Thought in Psychology

  • Structuralism
  • Functionalism
  • Behaviorism
  • Gestalt Psychology
• Structuralism


  • An approach that attempts to define the structure of the mind by breaking down mental experiences into their component parts
• Functionalism


  • Focused on how behavior helps individuals adapt to demands placed upon them in the environment
• Behaviorism


  • Promotes that psychology should limit itself to the study of overt behavior that observers could record and measure
• Gestalt Psychology


  • Studies ways in which the brain organizes and structures our perceptions of the world
• Wilhelm Wundt opened the first university-based psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879, founding psychology as a formal, recognized, scientific discipline
• G. Stanley Hall founded the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1892, now the largest organization of psychologists in the United States
• Introspection

  An attempt to directly study consciousness by having people report on what they are consciously experiencing
• Classical conditioning


  A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired: a response which is at first elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone
• Operant conditioning


  The study of how behavior is shaped by rewards and punishments, the environmental consequences that follow specific responses
• Types of Reinforcement and Punishment

  • Positive reinforcement (add pleasant stimulus to increase/maintain behavior)
  • Negative reinforcement (remove aversive stimulus to increase/maintain behavior)
  • Positive punishment (add aversive stimulus to decrease behavior)
  • Negative punishment (remove pleasant stimulus to decrease behavior)
• Operant conditioning


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

  • Reinforcement
  • Punishment
• Positive reinforcement

  Add pleasant stimulus to increase/maintain behavior
• Negative reinforcement


  Remove aversive stimulus to increase/maintain behavior
• Positive punishment


  Add aversive stimulus to decrease behavior
• Negative punishment


  Remove pleasant stimulus to decrease behavior
• Gestalt psychology


  The school of psychology that studies ways in which the brain organizes and structures our perceptions of the world
• Gestalt psychology


  • They rejected the structuralist belief that mental experience could be understood by breaking it down into its component parts
  • The 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
• Unconscious


  The 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 psychoanalysis


  • 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
  • Personality was largely set in stone by the age of five
  • Bringing information from the unconscious in the consciousness can lead to catharsis and allow people to deal with the issue
  • People utilize a number of defense mechanisms to protect themselves from information contained in the unconscious
  • Emotional and psychological problems such as depression and anxiety are often rooted in conflicts between the conscious and unconscious mind
  • A skilled analyst can help bring certain aspects of the unconscious into awareness by using a variety of psychoanalytic strategies such as dream analysis and free association
• Contemporary perspectives in psychology

  • Behavioral
  • Psychodynamic
  • Humanistic
  • Physiological
  • Cognitive
  • Sociocultural
• Levels at which a person's behavior or mental experience can be examined

  • Neural (brain as cause)
  • Physiological (internal chemical functions, such as hormones, as cause)
  • Genetic (genes as cause)
  • Evolutionary (natural selection as cause)
  • Learning (the individual's prior experiences with the environment as cause)
  • Cognitive (the individual's knowledge or beliefs as cause)
  • Social (the influence of other people as cause)
  • Cultural (the culture in which the person develops as cause)
  • Developmental (age-related changes as cause)
• Specialty areas in psychology

  • Educational
  • Developmental
  • Personality
  • Social
  • Industrial/organizational
  • Health
  • Consumer
• Emerging specialty areas in psychology

  • Neuropsychology
  • Geropsychology
  • Forensic psychology
  • Sport psychology