Chapter 1: Psych Yesterday and Today Flashcards
Psychology
the study of mental processes and behaviours.
Mental Processes
Activities of our brain when engaged in thinking, observing the environment, and using language.
Behaviours
Observable activities of an organism, often in response to environmental cues.
4 goals of studying mental processes and behaviour:
1) Describe - describe things they observed.
2) Explanation - answer question “why?”.
3) Prediction - predict circumstances involving mental processes and behaviour and behaviour that are likely to occur.
4) Control - controlling behaviour.
Levels of Analysis in Psychology
1) level of the brain - neuronal (brain cell) activity.
2) level of the person - how context influences and forms individuals.
3) level of the group - cultural environment.
Culture
A set of shared beliefs and practices that are transmitted across generations.
Historically, humans have attempted to explain inexplicable events in their lives through…
> Rituals: solemn ceremonies that are related to myths and involve sacred or customary ways of celebrating important religious or social occasions in a given culture.
Myths: stories of forgotten origin that seek to explain or rationalize the fundamental mysteries of life that are universal (common to all cultures).
Philosophy
the study of knowledge, reality, and the nature and meaning of life.
Greek Philosophy
- the intellectual history of psychology starts with the history of Greek philosophy because it had a recorded language.
- Greek philosophers in the 4th and 5th centuries B.C.E. tried to find ways to determine the nature of reality and the limitations of human awareness.
- Philosophers such as Plato, Aritstotle, and Hippocrates queried how the human mind worked, how the human body related to the mind, and whether knowledge was inborn or had to be learned from experience.
Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.E.)
- “The Father of Medicine”
- He believed that disease had a physical and rational explanation and was not caused by evil spirits or as a punishment from the gods.
- “Humourism”
- He believed that an individual’s physical and psychological health was influenced by an excess or a lack of one or more of four bodily humours
- 4 bodily humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile
- He was the first to recognize the importance of good food, fresh air, and rest, and he accurately diagnosed the symptoms of pneumonia and epilepsy.
- He also correctly identified the brain as the organ of mental life, and argued that thoughts, ideas, and feelings originated in the brain and not in the heart.
The 4 humours and temperament
- Galen of Pergamon associated Hippocrates’ humours with characteristics of temperament:
1) Blood (sanguine)
2) Phlegm (phlegmatic)
3) Yellow bile (choleric)
4) Black bile (melancholic)
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E)
- student of Plato’s
- one of the most famous thinkers
- one of the first to promote empirical, or testable, investigations of the natural world.
- he formed ideas about how living things are hierarchically categorized, concluding that humans are closely related to animals.
Psychology’s roots in physiology and psychophysics
- In the centuries both during and after tje Renaissance through to Associationism, Europeans society underwent a scientific revolution.
- A spiritial worldview was replaced by a view of the world base don mathematics and mechanics.
- The dominant view was that the brain controlled the body by moving fluids from one area to another.
Important philosophers at this time:
> Francis Bacon (1561-1625) - creator of empiricism: the view that all knowledge originates in experience.
> Rene Descartes (1596-1650) - the firts of modern philosophers. Believed the natural world could be understood through science and mathematics. Believed the mind to be distinct from the body.
> John Locke (1632-1704) - believed we learn by our experiences. He notably argues that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa - a blank slate.
> Johannes Muller (1801-1858) - pioneered the area of psychophysics. Believed researchers needed to study the relationship between physical stimuli and their psychological effects.
> Herman von Helmholtz (1821-1894) - first to measure the speed of a nerve impulse and determined that nerve impulses occur over time rather than instantaneously. Lead to the understanding that thought and movement are linked. This contributed to the foundation of modern physiological psychology and neuroscience.
> Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) - German philosopher and physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of experimental psychology.
> Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1930) - worked in the laboratory of Fechner.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
- First of the modern philosophers
- Viewed all truths as ultimately linked and believed that the meaning of the natural world could be understood through science and mathematics
- Believed the mind was distinct of the body
John Locke (1632-1704)
- Worked influenced by Bacon and Descartes.
- Believed that we learn by our experiences.
- Noted that the mind was a “tabula rasa”: a blank slate or “a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” waiting for experience to imprint knowledge.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
- Theory of evolution
- Suggested natural selection as the mechanism through which some variations survive over the years while other variations fall out of existence.
- His theories about human evolution shifted scientific attention toward human origins and behaviour.
Natural Selection
proposes that chance variations are passed down from parent to offspring, and that some of these variations are adaptive -better suited to an organism’s environment.
The Founding of Psychology
- Prior of the late 19th century, psychology was virtually indistinguishable from the study of philosophy.
- In 1879, however, the physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) opened a laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, dedicated exclusively to the study of psychology.
Wilhelm Windt (1832-1920)
- “The Father or Experimental Psychology”
- A natural scientist
- Believed that the study of mind and behaviour ought to be conducted using the experimental methods of other sciences such as chemistry and physics, so he established a program that trained students to perform empirically dirven experiments in psychology.
- Studied the content and processes of consciousness, the awareness of immediate behaviours, and mental processes.
- He developed voluntarism.
Consciousness
personal awareness of ongoing mental processes, behaviours, and environmental events.
Voluntarism
a theory in which will is regarded as the ultimate agency in human behaviour; belief that much of behaviour is motivated and that attention is focused for an explicit purpose.
James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934)
- established the first psychology lab in the British Empire in Toronto in 1890.
Structuralism: Looking for the Components of Consciousness - Titchener (1867-1927)
- Structuralism: a philosophical approach that studies the structure of conscious experience.
- Titchener’s goal was to uncover the structure, or basic elements, of the conscious mind. Ex: like looking at the parts that make up a car engine or bike or the individual bricks in a Lego sculptur, and to then determine how these elements were related.
- goal was to describe ovservable mental processes rather than to explain the mechanisms underlying consciousness or to try to control such mechanisms.
Introspection
- to study the conscious mind, the structuralists relied heavily on a method originated by Wundt, called introspection.
- Introspection: a method of psychological study involving careful evaluation of mental processes and how simple thoughts expand into complex ideas.
- was proved unreliable and skeptics pointed out that scientists using introspection often arrived at diverse findings.
Critiques of Structuralism
- failing to incorporate the study of animals and to examine issues of abnormal behaviour.
- emphasis on gethering knowledge for its own sake without any further agendas such as a desire to apply our knowledge of the mind in practical ways.
- critiques believed that speculation about unovservale events had no place in the scientific study of psychology
Functionalism: Toward the Practical Application of Psychology - William James (1842-1910)
- Functionalism: a philosophical approach that considers how mental processes function to adapt to changing environemtnms.
- James was instrumental in shifting attention away from the structure of mental content to the pupose and functions of our mental processes.
- Functionalism was based on the belief that scientists should examine the function or purpose of consciousness, rather than simply focusing on its structure. Ex: functionalists were less interesting in describing the parts of a car engine or bike, and more interested in what the engine or bike could do under a variety of conditions.
Structuralism vs Functionalism
- Functionalism did not relyt primarily on a single research methods, such as introspection.
- Functional approach alse highlighted differences among individuals rather than identifying only those characteristics that the shared.
- Unlike structuralism, functionalism emphasized the need for research to include animals, children, and persons with mental disorders in order to undertsand both normal and abnormal psychological functioning.
Pros of Functionalism
- helped to focus psychologists’ attention on what the mind can and does accomplish.
- Functionalism marked the beginning of exploration into socially important issues, such as emotional processing, learning, and education.
Gestalt Psychology: More than putting together the building blocks - Max Wertheimer (1880-1943)
- Gestalt Psychology: the field of psychology arguing that we have inborn tendencies to structure what we see in particular ways and to structure our perceptions into broad perceptual units.
- The word gestalt comes fro. the German origin meaning “whole” or “form”.
- The gestalt school rejected the ideas of structuralism and instead subscribed to the idea that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
- Gestaltists viewed learning as tied to perception.
- the Gestalt school helped guide psychology away from the study of individual elements and toward a broader view of the human mind and functioning.
