chap 1

• Psychology


  is the scientific study of behavior and men-

  tal processes.
• goals of psychology

  describe, explain, predict, and control
• theory


  a set of hypothesized

  statements about the relationships

  among events
• psychologist engage in

  research, practice, and teaching
• pure research


  is undertaken because the researcher

  is interested in the research topic.
• pure


  research has

  no immediate application to personal or social problems

  and has therefore been characterized as research for its

  own sake.
• applied research


  is designed to nd solutions to specic personal

  or social problems.
• clinical psychologist


  help people with psycho-

  logical disorders adjust to the demands of life. They evaluate problems such as anxiety and

  depression through interviews and psychological

  tests.
• counseling psychologist 


  use interviews and tests to dene their clients’ problems.

  Their clients typically have adjustment problems but not

  serious psychological disorders. For example, clients may

  have trouble making academic or vocational decisions;

  LGBT clients may have difculty coping with prejudice

  and discrimination.
• school psychologists


  psychologists are employed by school systems

  to identify and assist students who have problems that

  interfere with learning.
• educational psychologist 


  like school psychologists,

  attempt to facilitate learning, but they usually focus on

  course planning and instructional methods for a school

  system rather than on individual children. Educational
• developmental psychologists


  study the changes—

  physical, cognitive, social, and emotional—that occur

  throughout the life span.
• personality psychologists


  identify and measure

  human traits and determine inuences on human thought

  processes, feelings, and behavior. They are particularly

  concerned with issues such as anxiety, aggression, sexual

  orientation, and gender roles.
• social psychologists


  are concerned with the

  nature and causes of individuals’ thoughts, feelings,

  and behavior in social situations.
• environmental psychologists


  study the ways that

  people and the environment—the natural environment

  and the human-made environment—influence one

  another.
• experimental psychologists


  specialize in basic processes such as

  the nervous system, sensation and perception, learn-

  ing and memory, thought, motivation, and emotion.
• forensic psychologists 


  They deal with legal mat-

  ters such as whether a defendant was sane when

  he or she committed a crime.
• sport psychologists


  help athletes concentrate on

  their performance and not on the crowd, use cogni-

  tive strategies such as positive visualization (imagin-

  ing themselves making the right moves) to enhance

  performance, and avoid choking under pressure.
• health psychologists 


  psychologists study the effects of stress on

  health problems such as headaches, cardiovascular dis-

  ease, and cancer. they also guide clients

  toward healthier behavior patterns, such as exercising

  and quitting smoking.
• aristotle


  who argued that human behavior, like the movements of the

  stars and the seas, is subject to rules and laws. Then he

  delved into his subject matter topic by topic: personality,

  sensation and perception, thought, intelligence, needs and

  motives, feelings and emotion, and memory.?
• democritus


  he suggested

  that we could think of behavior in terms of a body and

  a mind. he was one of the rst to raise the

  question of whether there is free will or choice. Putting

  it another way, where do the inuences of others end and

  our “real selves” begin?
• socrates 


  who suggested that we should rely on ratio-

  nal thought and introspection—careful examination

  of one’s own thoughts and emotions—to gain self-

  knowledge. He also pointed out that people are social

  creatures who inuence one another.
• introspection 


  deliberate

  looking into one’s own cognitive

  processes to examine one’s thoughts

  and emotions
• founded the school of psy-

  chology called structuralism.

  wilhem wudnt
• structuralism 


  attempted to

  break conscious experience down

  into objective sensations, such

  as sight or taste, and subjective

  feelings, such as emotional

  responses, and mental

  images such as memories

  or dreams.
• william james 


  founder of the school of

  functionalism, which focused on behavior as well as

  the mind or consciousness.
• functionalism 


  the school of

  psychology that emphasizes the uses

  or functions of the mind rather than

  the elements of experience
• behaviorism


  is the school of psychology that

  focuses on learning observable behavior. The term

  observable refers to behaviors that are observable by

  means of specialized instruments, such as heart rate,

  blood pressure, and brain waves.
• john b watsons


  the

  founder of American

  behaviorism.
• BF Skinner 


  also contributed to

  behaviorism. He believed that organisms learn to

  behave in certain ways because they have been

  reinforced for doing so—that is, their behavior has a

  positive outcome.
• reinforcment 


  a stimulus that

  follows a response and increases the

  frequency of the response
• focused on perception and

  how perception inuences thinking and problem solv-

  ing.

  gestalt psychologists
• The German word _____ translates roughly to

  “pattern” or “organized whole.”

  gestalt
• the school

  of psychology that emphasizes the

  tendency to organize perceptions

  into wholes and to integrate separate

  stimuli into meaningful patterns

  gestalt psychology
• is the name

  of both the theory of personal-

  ity and the method of psycho-

  therapy developed by Sigmund

  Freud (1856–1939).

  psychoanalysis
• biological perspective


  the approach to psychology that seeks

  to understand the nature of the links

  between biological processes and

  structures such as the functioning

  of the brain, the endocrine system,

  and heredity, on the one hand, and

  behavior and mental processes, on

  the other
• cognitive


  having to do

  with mental processes such as

  sensation and perception, memory,

  intelligence, language, thought, and

  problem solving
• humanism 


  stresses the human capacity for self-

  fulfillment and the central roles of consciousness, self-

  awareness, and decision-making.
• existentialism


  views people as free to choose and as being responsible for choosing ethical conduct.
• Contemporary psychologists who follow theo-

  ries derived from Freud are likely to call them-

  selves ____

  neoanalysts