Ch. 1 Psychology's Roots, Big Ideas, and Critical Thinking Tools

Question 1

Psychology’s Roots

Answer 1

Aristotle wondered about learning and memory, motivation and emotions, perception and personality.

Question 2

Psychology’s Origin

Answer 2

December 1879, German university

Welhelm Wundt performed psychology’s first experiment, attempting to measure “atoms of the mind.”

Question 3

Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 3

German philosopher and physiologist

Question 4

Charles Darwin

Answer 4

English naturalist

Proposed evolutionary psychology

Question 5

Ivan Pavlov

Answer 5

Russian physiologist

Taught us about learning

Question 6

Sigmund Freud

Answer 6

Austrian physician

Personality theorist and therapist

Question 7

Jean Piaget

Answer 7

Swiss biologist

Explored children’s developing minds

Question 8

William James

Answer 8

American philosopher

Wrote a psychology textbook in 1890

Question 9

Mary Whiton Calkins

Answer 9

Denied a degree from Harvard
Researched memory.
First female president of the APA (American Psychological Association)

Question 10

Margaret Floy Washburn

Answer 10

First woman to receive a psychology Ph.D.

Second woman to become an APA president (1921)

Question 11

Early pioneers psychology definition

Answer 11

The science of mental life

Question 12

Behaviorist psychology definition

John B Watson and BF Skinner

Answer 12

The scientific study of observable behavior.

Question 13

Freudian psychology

Answer 13

Emphasized our unconscious though processes and our emotional responses to childhood experiences.

Question 14

Humanistic psychology

Answer 14

Led by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow
Emphasized the growth potential of healthy people.
Found behaviorism and Freudian psychology too limiting

Question 15

Cognitive psychology

Answer 15

Scientifically explores how we perceive, process, and remember information, and why we can become anxious or depressed.

Question 16

Cognitive neuroscience

Answer 16

Explores the brain activity underlying mental activity

Question 17

Today’s definition of psychology

Answer 17

The science of behavior and mental processes

Question 18

Behavior

Answer 18

Anything a human or nonhuman animal does- any action we can observe or record

Question 19

Mental processes

Answer 19

Internal stages we infer from behavior, such as thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.

Question 20

Neuroscience

Answer 20

How the body and brain enable emotions, memories, and sensory experiences.

Question 21

Evolutionary

Answer 21

How the natural selection of traits passed down from one generation to the next has promoted the survival of genes

Question 22

Behavior genetics

Answer 22

How our genes and our environment influence our individual differences

Question 23

Psychodynamic

Answer 23

How behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts

Question 24

Behavioral

Answer 24

How we learn observable responses

Question 25

Cognitive

Answer 25

How we encode, process, store, and retrieve information

Question 26

Social-cultural

Answer 26

How behavior and thinking vary across situations and cultures

Question 27

Critical thinking

Big idea #1

Answer 27

Science supports thinking that examines assumptions, uncovers hidden values, weighs evidence, and tests conclusions. Science aided thinking is smart thinking.

Question 28

The biopsychosocial approach.

Big idea #2

Answer 28

We can view human behavior from three levels. The biological, psychological, and social cultural. We share a biologically rooted human nature. Yet cultural and psychological influences fine tune our assumptions, values, and behaviors.

Question 29

The two track mind.

Big idea #3

Answer 29

Today’s psychological science explores our dual processing capacity. Our perception, thinking, memory, and attitudes all operate on two levels: an aware, conscious track, and an unaware, unconscious, automatic track.

Question 30

Exploring our human strengths

Big idea #3

Answer 30

Psychology today focuses not only on understanding and offering relief from troublesome behaviors and emotions, but also on understanding and building the emotions and traits that help us to rice.

Question 31

Critical thinking

Answer 31

Thinking that does not blindly accept arguments and conclusions. Rather, it examines assumptions, uncovers hidden values, weighs evidence, and assesses conclusions

Question 32

Culture

Answer 32

The enduring behaviors, ideas, attitudes, values, and traditions shared by a group of people and handed down from one generation to the next.

Question 33

Nature vs nurture issue

Answer 33

The age old controversy over the relative influence of genes and experience in the development of psychological traits and behaviors.

Question 34

Dual processing

Answer 34

The principle that, at the same time, our mind processes information on separate conscious and unconscious tracks.

Question 35

Positive psychology

Answer 35

The scientific study of human functioning, with the goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrive.

Question 36

Hindsight bias

Answer 36

The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we could have predicted it.

Question 37

Overconfidence

Answer 37

We think we know more than we do.

Question 38

Perceiving order in random events

Answer 38

In our natural eagerness to make sense of our world we often perceive patterns that aren’t there.

Question 39

The scientific attitude

Answer 39

Curious, skeptical, and humble