Chapter 1

Question 1

What is Dualism? Name a prominent figure.

Answer 1

Mind and body are fundamentally different things

Immaterial mind, material body

Prominent figures: René Descartes (1596-1650)

Hole in logic–how does the immaterial mind influence what the material body does?

Question 2

What is Materialism? Name a prominent figure.

Answer 2

All mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena

“The mind is what the brain does” Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Thought Descartes theory on dualism was dumb.

Question 3

Historically which theory won out, Materialism or Dualism?

Answer 3

Materialism

Present day psychologists favour Materialsm, religions often favor dualism or the idea of a soul.

Question 4

What is Realism? Name a prominent figure.

Answer 4

Perceptions of the physical world are produced entirely by information from the sensory organs.

John Locke (1632-1704) The eye is like a camera and we see things as they are.

Question 5

What is Idealism? Name a prominent figure.

Answer 5

Perceptions of the physical world are the brain’s interpretation of information from the sensory organs.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) our perceptions of the world are less like photographs and more like paintings, we interpret, guess, and make assumptions about the world around us.

Question 6

Historically which theory won out, Realism or Idealism?

Answer 6

Present day psychologists favour Idealism and believe our perception of the world is an inference—our brain’s best guess about what’s likely to be out there.

Question 7

What is Empiracism? Name a prominent figure.

Answer 7

All knowledge is acquired through experience.

John Locke thought Babies are blank slates and they learn what they know through experiencing it.

Question 8

What is Nativism? Name a prominent figure.

Answer 8

The view that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired.

Immanuel Kant argued humans are born with the knowledge of concepts such as space, time, causality and number.

Question 9

Historically which theory won out, Empiracism or Nativism?

Answer 9

Present day psychologists favour Nativism, although no one argues that much of our knowledge is learned through experience, in developmental psych we know that the slate is not blank and that infants seem to have some basic knowledge.

Question 10

What is structuralism?

Answer 10

An approach to psychology that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind’s basic elements.

The problem that faced structuralism was that it is very
hard to break up the mind into smaller parts since it was so subjective. The method of introspection didn’t really make for clear-cut categories because everyone’s experience looking at the color yellow, for example, is different.

Question 11

How was introspection used by the structuralists?

Answer 11

Tichener, a functionalist, had research assistents report their moment-to-moment raw experience as they observed a wide variety of stimulous (musical tones, colours, etc).

Trained observations from Titchener’s introspective reasarch students lead Wudnt to identify three basic dimensions of sensation—pleasure/pain, strain/relaxation, and excitation/quiescence.

Question 12

Name three structuralists.

Answer 12

Wundt, Tichener, Helmholtz

Question 13

How did Helmholtz calculate the speed at which nerves transmit impulses?

Answer 13

He tapped on peoples legs with their eyes closed and timed how long it took them to react.

Noticed it took longer for them to react when he tapped their toes vs. their thighs, because the thighs are closer to the brain.

Question 14

What is natural selection? Who came up with it?

Answer 14

Darwin, origin of species 1859

Refers to the process by which the specific attributes that promote an organism’s survival and reproduction become more prevalent in the population over time.

Question 15

What is Functionalism? Who was the main character? And what influenced them?

Answer 15

Functionalism is an approach to psychology that emphasized the adaptive significance of mental processes.

William James (the father of modern psychology) visited the german experimentalists but wasn’t sold on their theories of structuralism. He built on Darwin’s theories of Natural Selection but for the human mind.

Functionalism was looking at why our mind evolved and what was the function of it.

Question 16

What is Hysteria?

Answer 16

A loss of function that has no obvious physical origin.

Question 17

What did Sigmond Freud suspect of people suffering with hysteria?

Answer 17

Suspected that many of these patients had suffered a childhood experience so painful that they couldn’t allow themselves to remember it.

Question 18

What is Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory?

Answer 18

A general theory that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.

Freud would use a type of therapy that aimed to give people an insight into the contents of their unconscious minds.

Question 19

What is the unconscious mind?

Answer 19

The part of the mind that contains information of which people are not aware.

Question 20

Where did Freud have influence, and where did he not?

Answer 20

He was criticized by William James and many other experimental psychologists, he was considered a lunatic for his ideas on the unconscious mind

Clinicians paid a lot of attention to him, and he had a major effect on just about everything in the 20th century from history and philosophy to literature, art, and pop culture.

Question 21

What is Behaviourism?

Answer 21

An approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behavior.

Behaviourism was a valuable approach that has led to many important discoveries about human behavior, but it ignored the mind and it ignored the past.

Question 22

Who developed the behaviorist approach to psychology? Who was he influenced by?

Answer 22

John Watson

Ivan Pavlov

Question 23

Explain Pavlov’s Dogs and how that influenced the development of Behaviourism.

Answer 23

Noticed the dogs he was studying would get salivate when they heard the food steps of the lab tech coming to feed them not just when presented with food.

He performed an experiment where each time he presented the dogs with food he would sound a tone, after a few days he sounded the tone without feeding the dogs and the dogs still salivated.

Pavlov called the tone a stimulus and the salivation a response.

Watson used the Stimulus and Response ideas as the building blocks for behaviorism.

Question 24

Explain Skinners contributions to behaviourism.

Answer 24

Unlike lab animals, animals in the wild need to search for food, Skinner wanted to know how they learned to do that.

Skinner’s rats had learned to operate on their environments to produce food. When the rat’s behavior produced food (which Skinner called a “reinforcement”), the rat would repeat the behavior; and when it didn’t, the rat wouldn’t.

Question 25

What importance did the book Verbal Behavior by Skinner have on behaviorism as a whole?

Answer 25

He published it in 1957 and in 1959 Noam Chomsky wrote a scathing review where he argued that behaviorist principles could never explain some of the most obvious features of language-learning.

This marks the beginning of the end of behaviorism as the dominant method of psychology.

Question 26

Explain why several European psychologists resisted behaviourism.

Answer 26

European psychologists were quietly doing the very thing that behaviourism forbade: studying people’s perceptions, memories, and judgements in order to understand the nature of an unobservable entity called the mind.

Question 27

Explain why American social psychologists resisted behaviourism.

Answer 27

They rejected behaviourism and thought that responses do not depend on stimuli, as the behaviorists claimed; rather, they depend on how people think about those stimuli.

Question 28

What is the principle of reinforcement?

Answer 28

A principle stating that any behaviour that is rewarded will be repeated and any behaviour that isn’t won’t.

Question 29

What is social psychology?

Answer 29

The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.

Question 30

What was similar about Wertheimer’s and Bartlett’s findings?

Answer 30

Both had participants seeing or remembering things that didn’t didn’t actually happen the way they perceived, idealism

Max Wertheimer was Interested in how people perceive motion, and why people see things that aren’t there

He had people look at two flashing lights, when the lights were close together people said it was one dot moving back and forth, when the dots were far apart they said it was two dots flashing in sequence

Sir Fredric Bartlett studied why people remember things that didn’t really happen

He discovered that participants often remembered what they had expected to read rather than what they actually read.

Question 31

In what way was Piaget’s work incompatible with behaviourism?

Answer 31

Behaviourism looked at human behaviour only and did not think looking at how the mind works was worth while. Piaget was interested in how children’s minds worked so in that way it was incompatable with behaviourism.

Question 32

What basic idea underlay Kurt Lewin’s work and why did social psychologists reject behaviourism?

Answer 32

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) came to america in the 30’s after fleeing Europe at the rise of Hitler.

Studied topics such as leadership, communication, attitude change, and racial prejudice

Responses do not depend on stimuli, as the behaviorists claimed; rather, they depend on how people think about those stimuli.

His ideas gave birth to social psychology

Question 33

What is developmental psychology?

Answer 33

The study of the ways in which psychological phenomena change over the life span.

Question 34

Explain what cognitive psychology is and how it emerged.

Answer 34

Cognitive psychology is the study of human information-processing.

It emerged with the rise of computer technology.

Question 35

What was wrong with Skinner’s explanation of how children learn language?

Answer 35

Skinner failed to account for how children create novel sentences that they have never heard before. Behaviourism couldn’t account for how children learn grammar.

Question 36

How did the advent of the computer allow psychologists to talk about the mind?

Answer 36

With the advent of the computer and cognitive psychology we started to the brain like hardware and the mind as software, not a “ghost in the machine.” Computers can learn and have memory and so so can humans, and these aren’t made by moving hardware but by information processing within the hardware.

Question 37

What kind of evidence suggested that behaviorism was wrong to ignore the organism’s evolutionary history?

Answer 37

Behaviorists were empiricists and believed humans came into the world as blank slates.

Garcias radiation experiment on rats showed that regardless of what sound they played right before radiating the rats, the rats always associated nausea from the radiation poisoning with their food, not the sound — animals come into the world “biologically prepared” to learn some associations more easily than others.

E. O. Wilson tied it back to Natural selection like the functionalists and WIlliam James. He speculated about the evolutionary origins of human behavior. He considered how the hunter-gatherers from whom modern humans descended had coped with the challenges of survival and reproduction.

Question 38

What is evolutionary Psychology?

Answer 38

The study of the ways in which the human mind has been shaped by natural selection.

Question 39

Define neuroscience and explain how modern psychologists study the brain.

Answer 39

The study of the relationship between the brain and the mind (especially in humans).

Scientists used to mainly study damaged brains, where one was injured and what that meant for cognitive function.

Now they use MRI’s.

Question 40

Define cultural psychology and explain why it matters.

Answer 40

It is the study of how culture influences mental life.

For the longest time people assumed that psychology was universal, that culture wouldn’t change it so they ignored it.

Franz Boaz and James Frazer developed theories to explain the psychological differences they observed among people with different cultures.

Question 41

What kinds of things can be learned from brain scans?

Answer 41

MRIs are maps showing the amount of blood flowing to different parts of the brain at a moment in time.

Neural activity requires oxygen, blood supplies it, scans tell us which areas of the brain are processing the most information at a particular time.

Question 42

What is the difference between behavioural neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 42

Cognative is mainly a study of humans, and the relationship between the brain and the mind.

Behavioral is mainly non-human animals and the relationship between the brain and behavior.

Question 43

Give an example of a way in which culture shapes perception.

Answer 43

American and Japanese people were shown two draings that differed in a few small details.

Americans found more differences in the foreground, Japanese in the background.

Westerners process visual information “analytically”, attending to objects in the foreground

Easterners process visual information “holistically” by attending to the background

Question 44

Who was Paul Broca?

Answer 44

Discovered that when Broca’s area of the brain is damaged it effect’s the person’s ability to speak.

Question 45

Who was Wilder Pendfeild?

Answer 45

Famous neurosergion from Montral, pioneered the surgical removal of brain tissue to relieve seizure disorders.

He stimulated parts of awake patients during surgery and discover how different parts of the brain support mental function.

Question 46

Who is Brenda Milner?

Answer 46

Worked with Penfield, best known for the brain basis of long-term memory.

Question 47

Outline the different kinds of training psychologists may receive.

Answer 47

To become a psychologist you need a PhD in Psychology.

To earn a PhD, students must attend graduate school, and learn to do original research by collaborating with professors.

Question 48

How has the makeup of psychology changed over the past 150 years?

Answer 48

It used to mainly be white men dominating psychology, now around 70% of people getting PhD’s are women, racialized members are growing as well.

Question 49

What do most people who earn a PhD in psychology do with that degree?

Answer 49

Most people work as clinical psychologists

Question 50

What are some of the careers that psychologists might pursue?

Answer 50

Professors
Clinical psychologists
Clinical neuropsychology
Counseling

Question 51

What is scientific racism?

Answer 51

the use of scientific concepts and data to create and justify ideas of an enduring, biologically based racial hierarchy.

Question 52

Why are IQ tests racist?

Answer 52

1920s and early 1930s debates over race and intelligence test scores were carried on almost entirely among White academics.

White scientists used these tests to prove black children were less smart then white children, didn’t take into account, segregation lead to lower education levels for black students and observation bias, the white researchers expected the black students to do poorly.

Question 53

Who was J. Philippe Rushton?

Answer 53

A racist psychologist at western university in Canada, Was releasing racist papers well into the 2000’s

Question 54

Who was Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark?

Answer 54

Studied children in the 1900’s, found black children tested with IQ tests and diagnosed with a learning disability, were diagnosed wrongly. White examiners went in expecting the black children to do badly, their biases affected the results.

Question 55

Who was Dr. Herman George?

Answer 55

Examined the role of the examiner and the testy with these IQ tests, observational bias and rasicm in IQ tests.