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Psychology 120 & 121 > 1: Introducing Psychology > Flashcards

1: Introducing Psychology Flashcards

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1
Q

What is Psychology?

A

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behaviour.

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2
Q

Where does the word “Psychology” come from?

A

“Psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche”, meaning life, and “logos”, meaning explanation.

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3
Q

What do Research Psychologists do?

A

Research Psychologists use scientific methods to create new knowledge about the causes of behaviour.

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4
Q

What do Psychologist-Practitioners do?

A

Psychologist-Practitioners use existing research to enhance the everyday lives of others.

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5
Q

What are Empirical Methods?

A

The processes of collecting and organizing data and drawing conclusions about those data.

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6
Q

What is the Scientific Method?

A

The scientific method is the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures that scientists use to conduct empirical research.

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7
Q

What are values?

A

Values are personal statements.

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8
Q

What are facts?

A

Facts are objective statements determined to be accurate through empirical study.

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9
Q

What are the Levels of Explanation in Psychology?

A

Levels of explanation are the perspectives that are used to understand behaviour.

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10
Q

What is the lower level of explanation?

A

The lower levels are more closely tied to biological influences, such as genes, neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

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11
Q

What is the middle level of explanation?

A

The abilities or characteristics of the individual.

Example: “Joe understands math”

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12
Q

What is the higher/upper level of explanation?

A

They relate to social groups, organizations, and cultures.

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13
Q

What are the challenges of studying psychology?

A
  1. People vary and respond differently in different situations.
  2. Almost all behaviour is multiply determined (produced by many factors).
  3. Human behaviour is also caused by factors that are outside of our conscious awareness, making it impossible for us, as individuals, to really understand them.
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14
Q

What is the Hindsight Bias?

A

The hindsight bias leads us to think that we could have predicted events that we actually could not have predicted.

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15
Q

Why do scientists use the scientific method?

A

Employing the scientific method allows the scientist to collect empirical data objectively, which adds to the accumulation of scientific knowledge.

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16
Q

Who are the earliest psychologists we know about?

A

The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle.

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17
Q

What did Plato believe?

A

Plato believed that much knowledge was innate

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18
Q

What did Aristotle believe?

A

Aristotle thought that each child was born as an “empty slate” and that knowledge was primarily acquired through learning and experience.

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19
Q

Who was Rene Descartes, and what did he believe?

A

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher that considered free will. He believed that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland.

He was among the first to understand that nerves control muscles.

He believed in dualism: the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.

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20
Q

What is dualism?

A

The belief that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.

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21
Q

Who were the first two research psychologists?

A
  1. The German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.
  2. The American psychologist William James (1842-1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University.
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22
Q

What is Structuralism?

A

Structuralism is a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological experience.

Its goal was to create a table of elements of sensations.

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23
Q

What method was often used by Structuralist Psychologists?

A

Introspection, which involved asking research participants to describe exactly what they experienced as they worked on mental tasks.

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24
Q

Who began the field known as structuralism?

A

Wilhelm Wundt

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25
Q

Who was Wilhelm Wundt?

A

A German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.

Wundt’s research in his laboratory in Leipzig focused on the nature of consciousness itself. Wundt and his students believed that it was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind and to classify our conscious experiences scientifically.

26
Q

Who is quoted as saying “The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of our own consciousness”?

A

Wilhelm Wundt, 1874

27
Q

What theory influenced the school of Functionalism?

A

Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful, or functional.

28
Q

What is functionalism?

A

The school of functionalism aimed to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess.

29
Q

What school of psychology did William James belong to?

A

The school of functionalism

30
Q

Who is quoted as saying “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of doing”

A

William James, 1890

31
Q

What did functionalist psychologists believe?

A

Just as some animals have developed strong muscles to allow them to run fast, the human brain, so functionalist thought, must have adapted to serve a particular function in human experience.

32
Q

What did the work of functionalists develop into?

A

Evolutionary psychology, a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behaviour.

33
Q

What is fitness?

A

Fitness is a key component of the ideas of evolutionary psychology.

It is the extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic.

34
Q

What is Psychodynamic Psychology?

A

An approach to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.

This view of psychology emphasizes the role of the unconscious mind, early childhood experiences, and interpersonal relationships to explain human behaviour, as well as to treat mental illnesses.

35
Q

Who championed psychodynamic psychology?

A

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers (Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson).

36
Q

What is psychoanalysis?

A

A method of therapy in which the patient talks about experiences, early childhood, and dreams. It refers to both a theory and a type of therapy based on the belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.

According to the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA), psychoanalysis can help people understand themselves by exploring their unrecognized impulses hidden in the unconscious.

In psychotherapy, people are able to feel safe as they explore feelings, desires, memories, and stressors that can lead to psychological difficulties.

37
Q

What is behaviourism?

A

A school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore, that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behaviour itself.

They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what happens in our mind because we can successfully predict behaviour without knowing what happens inside the brain.

38
Q

Who was the first behaviourist?

A

The first behaviourist was the American psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958).

39
Q

What did behaviourists use their ideas to explain?

A

How events that people and other organisms experienced in their environment (stimuli) could produce specific behaviours (responses).

40
Q

Who was Watson’s biggest Influence?

A

Watson was influenced in large part by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food.

41
Q

What is “Pavlov’s Dog”?

A

A famous behaviourist experiment. Ivan Pavlov found that a stimulus (either the food or, after learning, the tone) would produce the response of salivation in the dogs.

42
Q

What is “Little Albert”?

A

Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could lead the child to respond with a fearful behaviour to the presence of the objects.

43
Q

What is “Skinner Box”?

A

Burrhus Frederick (B.F.) Skinner used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of rewards or reinforcements, to train pigeons and other animals.

44
Q

What is cognitive psychology?

A

A field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgement.

In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behaviour, the cognitive approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviourism.

According to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the stimuli that they experience.

The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over the past decade as the result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action using neuroimaging techniques.

45
Q

Who was Hermann Ebbinghaus?

A

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), was a cognitive psychologist who studied the ability of people to remember lists of words under different conditions.

46
Q

Who was Sir Frederic Bartlett?

A

Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969) was a cognitive psychologist who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering.

47
Q

What school of psychology did Donald E. Broadbent, Daniel Kahneman, George Miller, Eleanor Rosch, Amos Tversky, and Jean Piaget belong to?

A

Cognitive psychology

48
Q

What is social-cultural psychology?

A

The study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour.

49
Q

What are social-cultural psychologists concerned with?

A

How people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence each other’s behaviour.

50
Q

Social norms are important to social-cultural psychologists. What are they?

A

The ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate.

51
Q

What does “culture” represent?

A

The common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region.

52
Q

What is individualism, and where is it common?

A

Individualism: valuing the self and one’s independence from others.

This social norm is common in Western cultures.

53
Q

What is collectivism, and where is it common?

A

Collectivism values interdependence and a focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others.

This social norm is common in East Asian cultures.

54
Q

What is conformity?

A

A process in which individuals frequently change their beliefs and behaviours to be similar to those of the people they care about.

55
Q

What is data?

A

Any information collected through formal observation and measurement.

56
Q

What is depression?

A

A psychological disorder that affects millions of people worldwide and is known to be caused by biological, social, and cultural factors.

57
Q

What is the heritability of the characteristic?

A

The proportion of the observed differences of characteristics among people (e.g. in terms of their height, intelligence, or optimism) that is due to genetics.

58
Q

What are individual differences?

A

The variations among people on physical or psychological dimensions.

59
Q

What is neuroimaging?

A

The use of various techniques to provide pictures of the structure and function of the living brain.

60
Q

What are psychologist-practitioners?

A

They use existing research to enhance the everyday life of others.

Examples include clinical, counselling, industrial-organizational, and school psychologists.

Psychology 120 & 121 (11 decks)

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