Intro to PSY202 Flashcards
Psychology
Scientific study of the human mind and behaviour.
Consciousness
subjective experience of our body and the world.
The McGurk Effect
the perception of an auditory stimulus is altered by a visual stimulus.
Affective forecasting
has to do with predictions you make about how you’ll feel when something happens.
Forecasting error
the inconsistency between a prior expectation and reality.
Focalism bias
the tendency to narrow in on a single event and believe that this single event will have a large influence on your happiness, ignoring other aspects of one’s life.
Why do we need psychology?
truths about our minds are counter intuitive.
Examples of affective forecasting
- freshemn students and dorm assignments.
- people in relationships that break up.
- teachers who don’t get tenure.
Scientific Method
- ) Developing Hypothesis
- ) Collecting Real-world/Objective data
- ) Falsifiability
Is psychology different from other fields?
yes:
(1) we use the mind to study the mind.
(2) mental events cant be directly observed.
(3) relatively young science, but it answers ancient questions.
Areas of Psych
1) cognitive: how people reason, think, etc.
2. ) developmental: how a persons mind and behaviour changes through their lifespan.
3. ) neuroscience: how perception, attention & memory is reflected in brain tissue.
4. ) personality: studies stable traits that seem to separate one person from the next.
5. ) affect: study of emotion.
6. ) clinical: talks about psychopathology.
7. ) social: individuals vs group
Levels of Analysis
- ) thoughts
- ) neurophysiology
- ) culture/society
- ) genes
Do we have free will?
experiment with wrist flicking found that a brain signal happened prior to “conscious” will which implied that the action was not freely chosen.
