Chapter 1 Psychology Flashcards
Psychologists focus on both the activity of the brain and the structure and properties of the organ itself - brain cells and their connections, the chemical soup in which they exist, and the genes that give rise to them
Level of the brain
Psychologists focus on mental events - the contents and functions of the mind
Level of the person
Consist of knowledge, beliefs, desires, and feelings
Mental Contents
Consist of operations that work together to carry out a function, such as attention, perception, or memory
Mental Processes
Psychologists focus on the ways that collections of people shape the mind and behavior
“No man is an Island”
Level of a group
The science of the mind and behavior.
Focuses on both the internal events that underlie our thoughts and feelings, and the behavior itself.
Psychology
The roots of Psychology lie in ____ and _____
Philosophy and Physiology
The field that relies on logic and speculation to understand the nature of reality, experience, and values
Philosophy
The field that studies the biological workings of the body, including the brain
Physiology
Focused attention on the distinction between mind and body and the relation between the two (which is still a focus of considerable debate)
Rene Descartes
Stressed that all human knowledge arises from experience of the world or from reflection about it.
Argues that we know about the world only via how it is represented in them mind
John Locke
The first organized “school of thought” in psychology.
Sough to identify the “building blocks” of consciousness)
The goal was to describe the rules that determine how particular sensations or feelings may occur at the same time or in sequence, combining in various ways into mental structures.
Structuralism
Broadened the structuralist approach to apply it to the nature of concepts and thinking in general
Edward Titchener
“looking within”
The technique of observing your mental events as, or immediately after, they occur
Introspection
How could you prove that mental images actually exist and that objects can indeed be visualized?
Considerable amount of mental contents and of mental processing cannot be accessed via introspection
Problems with introspection
Sought to understand how our minds help us to adapt to the world around us
Wanted to know why humans think, feel, and behave as we do
Functionalism
The functionalists were strongly influenced by _______, whose theory of evolution by natural selection stressed that some individual organisms in every species, from ants to oak trees, possess characteristics that enable them to survive and reproduce more fruitfully than others.
Charles Darwin
Studied the ways in which being able to pay attention can help an individual survive and adapt to an environment
William James
Emphasized the overall patterns of perceptions and thoughts;
“the whole is more than the sum of its parts”
Gestalt Psychology
Enhanced Gestalt Psychology
Noted that much of the content our thoughts come from what we perceive and, further, from inborn tendencies to structure what we sense in certain ways.
Max Wertheimer
A Viennese Physician who specialized in neurology (the study and treatment of diseases of the brain and the nervous system more generally), developed a theory that reached into all corners of human thought, feeling, and behavior
Sigmund Freud
“they are outside our awareness and beyond our ability to being into awareness at will”
unconscious
The term refers to the continual push-and-pull interaction among conscious and unconscious forces and specifies how such interactions affect behavior.
Psychodynamic theory
Focuses on how a specific stimulus evokes a specific response; together these are sometimes referred to as stimulus-response associations.
Behaviorism
