Chapter 1 Flashcards
Define mind?
Private mental activity and experiences.
Define psychological science?
The study of the mind and behaviour.
Define Behaviour?
Observable actions, all the things that people do.
What did Lin Xie test?
Peoples vulnerability to distraction by asking them to draw a circle with one hand and a square with the other.
What is the Edwin Smith Papyrus
In ancient Egypt it includes early descriptions of the brain and how it works.
What are the Dead Sea scrolls?
In Judeo-Christian tradition the Dead Sea scrolls note the division of human nature into two temperaments.
Medieval Muslim physicians developed?
Methods aimed to treat patients suffering from “diseases from the mind”
What did Plato argue in favor of? Define it.
Plato argued in favour of nativism - certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn.
What did Aristotle argue in favor in? Define it.
Aristotle argued for philosophical empiricism - all knowledge Is acquired through experience. Meaning a child’s mind is “Tabula rasa” in English.. A blank slate.
What did Rene Descartes believe?
That the mind and body are fundamentally differently. Dualism. Descartes believed that mind and body communicate through the pineal gland.
What did Thomas Hobbes argue about dualism?
That minds and bodies aren’t different entities - the mind is what the brain does.
What did Franz Joseph Gall think?
That brains and minds were linked by size.
Franz Gall developed what theory? Describe it.
Phrenology - specific mental abilities and characteristics, ranging from memory to the capacity for happiness, are localized in specific regions in the brain.
What are phrenologies 5 main principles?
- The brain is the organ of the mind.
- The mind consists of about 3 dozen faculties, which are intellectual or emotional.
- Each faculty had own brain location.
- People who have more of certain faculties have more brain tissue at that location.
- You can measure your skull to assess the faculty sizes of your brain. (Doctrine of the skull)
What did Pierre Flourens do?
Surgically removed parts of animal brains and found that their actions and movements differed from those with intact brains.
What did Paul Broca do?
Worked with a patient with a damage to the left side of his brain, who could understand but not produce language. Now called the Broca’s area.
Define physiology?
The study of biological processes, especially in the human body.
What did Wilhelm Wundt do?
Opened the first laboratory exclusively devoted to the study of psychology at the university of Leipzig in 1879.
What is consciousness?
A persons subjective experience of the world and the mind. This is what Wundt believed psychology should focus on.
Wundt adopted an approach called?
Structuralism - the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind.
Define introspection?
The subjective observations of ones own experience.
How did structuralism come to the U.S.
Edward Tichener. Who set up his own lab at Cornell University.
What did William James believe?
That structuralism distorted the true nature of consciousness.
William James came up with what?
Functionalism - the study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their environment.
Define hysteria?
Temporary loss of cognitive or motor functions, usually as the result of emotions upsetting experiences.
Define the unconscious mind?
The part of the mind that operates outside of conscious awareness but influences conscious thoughts, feelings and actions.
Define psychoanalysis?
Bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness.
Name the 5 stages of psychosexual development?
- Oral stage
- Anal stage
- Phallic stage
- Latency stage
- Genital stage
Define natural selection
Charles darwins theory that the features of an organism that help it survive are what is most likely passed on rather than other features.
What did Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers develop? Define it.
Humanistic psychology. An approach to understanding human nature that emphasizes the positive potential of human beings.
Define behaviourism?
An approach that advocates that psychologists restrict themselves to the scientific study of objectively observable behaviour.
Define response?
An action or physiological change elicited by a stimulus.
Define reinforcement?
The consequences of a behaviour determine whether it will be more or less likely to occur again.
Define illusions?
Errors of perception, memory, or judgement in which subjective experience differs from objective reality.
What did Max Wertheimers interpretation of illusions lead to?
Gestalt psychology. An approach that emphasizes that we often perceive the whole rather that the sum of the parts.
Define emergence?
The image emerges as a unified whole.
Define reification?
The constructive aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information that the sensory stimulus.
Define multistability?
The tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to PPP back and fourth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.
Define invariance?
The property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale.
Define cognitive psychology?
The scientific study of mental processes, including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning.
Who first used cognitive psychology?
Ulric Neisser. In his book “cognitive psychology”.
What did Karl Lashley do?
Trained rats to run mazes and then removed sections of their brains.
Define behavioural neuroscience?
An approach to psychology that that links psychological processes to activity in the nervous system and other bodily processes.
Define cognitive neuroscience?
The field of study that attempts to understand the links between cognitive processes and brain activity.
What is electroencephalography (EEG)?
The recording of electrical activity along the scalp.
What is Functional Magnetic Resonance imaging? (fMRI)
Measures brain activity by detecting associated changes in blood flow.
What is Positron emission tomography? (PET)
A nuclear imaging technique that produces a 3 dimensional image of functional processes in the brain using gamma rays.
Define evolutionary psychology?
A psychological approach that explains mind and behaviour in terms of the adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over time by natural selection.
Define social psychology?
The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.
What did Solomon Asch do?
Conducted a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the power of conformity in groups.
What did Gordon Allport do?
Studied stereotyping, prejudice, and racism as perceptual errors.
What did Glucksberg test?
Tested motivation with a reward.
Define cultural psychology?
The study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members.
Define absolutionism?
Culture makes little difference on psychology.
Define relativism?
Psychological phenomena are likely to vary considerably across cultures.
