Foundations for the Study of Psychology

Question 1

Psychology

Answer 1

The science of behavior and the mind

Question 2

Behavior

Answer 2

Observable actions of a person or an animal

Question 3

Mind

Answer 3

Individual’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotions, and other subjective experiences

All of the unconscious knowledge and operating rules that are built into or stored in the brain and that provide the foundation for organising behaviour and conscious experience

Question 4

Science

Answer 4

All attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical analysis of objectively observable data

Question 5

The founding of psychology as a formal, recognized, scientific discipline is com- monly dated to

Answer 5

1879

Question 6

Why opened the first university based psychology laboratory and where?

Answer 6

Wilhelm Wundt

Leipzig

Question 7

Dualism

Answer 7

The church maintained that each human being consists of two distinct but intimately conjoined entities, a material body and an immaterial soul

Question 8

Limitations of Descartes theory based on psychology

Answer 8

The theory sets strict limits, which few psychologists would accept today, on what can and cannot be understood scientifically.

Question 9

Limitations of Descartes theory based on philosophy

Answer 9

It stumbles on the question of how a nonmaterial entity (the soul) can have a material effect (movement of the body), or how the body can follow natural law and yet be moved by a soul that does not

Question 10

What does Hobbes argue?

Answer 10

That spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept and that nothing exists but matter and energy

Question 11

Argument of Hobbes is now known as

Answer 11

Materialism

Question 12

Reflexology view

Answer 12

Argued that every human action, “[b]e it a child laughing at the sight of toys, or. . . Newton enunciating universal laws and writing them on paper,” can in theory be understood as a reflex.

All human actions, he claimed, are initiated by stimuli in the environment. The stimuli act on a person’s sensory receptors, setting in motion a chain of events in the nervous system that culminates in the muscle movements that constitute the action.

Question 13

Empiricism

Answer 13

Refers to the idea that human knowledge and thought derive ultimately from sensory experience (vision, hearing, touch, and so forth)

Question 14

What did Locke believe?

Answer 14

Viewed a child’s mind as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, and believed that experience serves as the chalk that writes on and fills the slate

From this perspective, there is no “human nature” other than an ability to adapt one’s behavior to the demands of the environment.

Question 15

Association by contiguity

Answer 15

If a person experiences two environmental events (stimuli, or sensations) at the same time or one right after the other (contiguously), those two events will become associated (bound together) in the person’s mind such that the thought of one event will, in the future, tend to elicit the thought of the other.

Question 16

Contiguity

Answer 16

Refers to closeness in space or time

Question 17

Opposite of empiricism

Answer 17

Nativism

Question 18

Nativism

Answer 18

The view that the most basic forms of human knowledge and the basic operating characteristics of the mind, which provide the foundation for human nature are native to the hum mind

Question 19

Priori knowledge

Answer 19

Built into the human brain and does not have to be learned

Question 20

Posteriori knowledge

Answer 20

Gained from experience in the environment

Question 21

Example of Priori and Posteriori knowledge

Answer 21

The specific words and grammar that the child acquires are a posteriori knowledge, but the child’s ability to learn a language at all depends on a priori knowledge.

Question 22

Behavioural neuroscience

Answer 22

How the nervous system produces the specific type of experience or behaviour being studied

Question 23

Activation of the left frontal cortex is associated with

Answer 23

Approach-motivation, typically associated with pleasurable activities