Chapter 1 - Section 1 Three Fundamental Ideas for Psychology: A Historical Overview Flashcards
What is the formal definition of psychology?
The science of behavior and the mind. (p. 3)
What does behavior in the definition of psychology refer to?
The observable actions of a person or an animal. (p. 3)
What does mind in the definition of psychology refer to?
An individual’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotions, and other subjective experiences.
It also refers to all of the unconscious knowledge and operating rules that are built into or stored in the brain and that provide the foundation for organizing behavior and conscious experience. (p. 3)
What does science in the definition of psychology refer to?
All attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical analysis of objectively observable data. (p. 3)
What was the founding of psychology as a formal, recognized, scientific discipline?
When Wilhelm Wundt opened the first university-based psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879.
At about that same time, Wundt also authored the first psychology textbook and began monitoring psychology’s first official graduate students. The first people to earn Ph.D. degrees in psychology were Wundt’s students. (p. 4)
What are the three fundamental ideas of psychology, all of which were conceived of and debated before psychology was recognized as a scientific discipline?
- Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied scientifically. (Physical causation of behavior)
2 The way people behave, think, and feel is modified over time by their experiences in their environment. (The role of experience)
3 The body’s machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences, is a product of evolution by natural selection. (The evolutionary basis of mind and behavior) (p. 5 and 11)
What is dualism?
A view (the church maintained) that each human being consists of two distinct but intimately conjoined entities, a material body and an immaterial soul. (p. 5)
How was Descartes’ version of dualism?
He was familiar with research on the flow of blood and began to regard the body as an intricate, complex machine that generates its own heat and is capable of moving, even without the influence of the soul.
He believed that even quite complex behaviors can occur through purely mechanical means, without involvement of the soul.
He described only the function of thought to the soul (whereas previous philosophers ascribed many functions to the soul). (p. 5-6)
How did Descartes’ version of dualism help pave the way for a science of psychology?
To be useful, thought must be responsive to the sensory input channeled into the body through the eyes, ears and other sense organs, and it must be capable of directing the body’s movements by acting on the muscles. Descartes suggested that the soul, though not physical, acts on the body at a particular physical location.
Thread-like structures, which we now call nerves or neurons, bring sensory information by physical means into the brain, where the soul receives the information and, by nonphysical means, thinks about it.
On the basis of those thoughts, the soul then wills movements to occur and executes its will by triggering physical actions in nerves that, in turn, act on muscles.
With its heavy emphasis on the body, Descartes’s dualism certainly helped open the door for a science of psychology. (p. 6)
(Descartes’ dualism placed more emphasis on the role of the body than had previous versions of dualism. To the degree that behavior and the mind have a physical basis, they are open to study just like the rest of the natural world. P. 11)
What reasons can you think of for why Descartes’ theory, despite its intuitive appeal, was unsuitable for a complete psychology?
The whole realm of thought, and all behaviors that are guided by thought, are out of bounds for scientific analysis if they are the products of a willful soul. Therefore the theory sets strict limits on what can and cannot be understood scientifically, which few psychologists would accept today. (p. 6)
When did Descartes live?
1596-1650 (p. 5)
How did Hobbes’s materialism help lay the groundwork for a science of psychology?
He argued that spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept and that nothing exists but matter and energy, a philosophy now known as materialism.
In his view, all human behavior, including the seemingly voluntary choices we make, can in theory be understood in terms of physical processes in the body, especially the brain.
Conscious thought, he maintained, is purely a product of the brain’s machinery and therefore subject to natural law.
This philosophy places no theoretical limit on what psychologists might study scientifically.
His ideas helped inspire empiricism. (p. 6-7)
(Hobbes’s materialism held that behavior is completely a product of the body and thus physically caused. To the degree that behavior and the mind have a physical basis, they are open to study just like the rest of the natural world. P. 11)
How did the nineteenth-century understanding of the nervous system inspire a theory of behavior called reflexology?
The basic arrangement of the nervous system - consisting of a central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and peripheral nerves that connect the central nervous system to sense organs and muscles - was well understood by the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Some physiologists began to suggest that all human behavior occurs through reflexes - that even so-called voluntary actions are actually complex reflexes involving higher parts of the brain.
It was claimed that all human actions are initiated by stimuli in the environment. (p. 7)
How did discoveries of localization of function in the brain help establish the idea that the mind can be studied scientifically?
The concept of localization of function is that specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in the production of mental experience and behavior.
Experiments with animals showed for example that damage to different parts of the brain produces different kinds of deficits in animal’s abilities to move.
Such evidence about the relationships between mind and brain helped to lay the groundwork for a scientific psychology because it gave substance to the idea of a material basis for mental processes. (p. 7-8)
What is empiricism?
The idea that human knowledge and thought derive ultimately from sensory experience (vision, hearing, touch, and so forth).
Locke viewed a child’s mind as a tabula rasa, or blank state, and believed that experience serves as the chalk that writes on and fills the slate.
Locke argued that, outside of extremes, children are born with no dispositions to make some types of learning easier than others. (p. 8-9)
