Chapter 1: Introduction to Psych Flashcards
Psychology:
is the scientific study of the mind and behavior
Psych is based on…
empiricism which means based on observation, investigation, or experiment instead of abstract reasoning
Wilhem Wundt
- 1832-1920
- German scientist who was the 1st person to be named as a psychologist
- established the first lab and used the scientific method
- viewed psych as a conscious experience and we had to identify those components to combine and result in the conscious experience
- believed in introspection (internal perception) looking at oneself and examining personal thoughts and emotions
- experimental introspection: measured rxn time
Voluntarism:
that people have free will and should know the intentions of a psychological experiment they are participating in (believed by Wundt)
Structuralism:
- thought by Edward Titchener (Wundt’s student)
- used introspection
- self observation of conscious
- focus on the content of mental processes rather than their function
- seeks to analyze the elements of mental experiences, such as sensations, mental images, and feelings, and how these elements combine to form more complex experiences
- perception of sensations vs sensations
- highly subjective
William James
- looked at psych through the theory of natural perspective and adaption, he saw the purpose was to study the function of behavior in the world
- the above is aka functionalism
Functionalism:
how mental activities helped adaption and was interested in the whole mind instead of parts like structuralism
G. Stanley Hall
- Founder of Psych in America
- Developed a lab at JHU
- Founded the APA
Sigmund Freud
- Austrian neurologist
- theorized hysteria and neurosis arose from the unconscious mind
-Developed the psychoanalytic theory - Developed the importance of childhood experiences in adult motivation and the importance of personality development
Psychoanalytic theory
focuses on the role of a person’s unconscious and how it reflects into the conscious
- psychoanalysis treatment: therapy basically just talk
Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler
- the 3 German psychs who introduced the US to Gestalt (aka whole)
- explained that even thought these sensory experiences can be broken down into separate parts how they relate to each other as a while is often what the person repons to in perception
- which contradicted the idea of structuralism
Ivan Pavlov
- learning behavior can become a conditioned reflex basically an unconscious response to a stimulus which leads to having the same response to a different stimulus that was associated with the og stimulus (aka as classical conditioning)
John B. Watson
- Shifted the focus of psych from the mind to behavior which lead to behaviorism
Behaviorism:
- Ivan Pavlov and BF Skinner was a behaviorist but Watson developed it
- study of observable behavior (focuses on how people learn through their interactions with the environment)
- based on the idea that behavior is acquired from conditioning (reinforcement and punishment)
- responsible for establishing psych as a scientific discipline through objective methods and experimentation (animals)
BF Skinner
- positive and negative reinforcement and punishment
- conditioned learning