Introduction to Psychology and Research Methods Flashcards
Psychology
The scientific study of behavior and mental processes.
What are the types of behavior?
- Overt beheavior — directly observable actions and responses.
- Covert behavior — private mental events, such as thinking, dreaming, and remembering.
Common sense
Beliefs or propositions that are generally agreed upon to reflect sound judgement and nonesoteric reasoning.
Scientific observation
An empirical observation structured to answer questions about the world in a systematic and intersubjective fashion.
Research method
A systematic approach to answering scientific questions.
What are the psychology’s goals?
- Description — naming and classifying, making detailed records.
- Understanding — stating the cause of behavior.
- Prediction — ability to forecast behavior accurately.
- Control — ability to alter the conditions that affect behavior.
Critical thinking
A form of directed, problem-focused thinking in which the individual tests ideas or possible solutions for errors or drawbacks.
What are the principles of critical thinking?
- Few “truths” transcend the need for logical analysis and empirical testing. Only things related to faith and personal values don’t require critical thinking.
- Critical thinkers often wonder what it would take to show that a “truth” is false.
- Authority or claimed expertise does not automatically make an idea true or false.
- Judging the quality of evidence is crucial.
- Critical thinking requires an open mind.
Pseudopsychology
Any false and unscientific system of beliefs and practices that is offered as an explanation of behavior.
Superstition
Unfounded belief held without evidence or in spite of falsifying evidence.
Phrenology
Science claimed that personality traits are revealed by the shape of the skull.
Palmistry
Claims that lines on the hand reveal personality traits and predict the future.
Graphology
Claims that personality traits are revealed by handwriting.
Uncritical acceptance
The tendency to believe claims because they seem true or because it would be nice if they were true.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence.
Barnum effect
The tendency to consider a personal description accurate if it is stated in general terms.
Scientific method
A set of procedures, guidelines, assumptions, and attitudes required for the organized and systematic collection, interpretation, verification of data and the discovery of reproducible evidence, enabling laws and principles to be stated or modified.
What are the 6 elements of scientific method?
- Making observation
- Defining a problem
- Proposing a hypothesis
- Gathering evidence \ testing the hypothesis
- Theory building
- Publishing results
Hypothesis
A statement of the predicted outcome of an experiment or an educated guess about the relationship between variables.
Operational definition
A description of something in terms of the operations by which it could be observed and measured.
Theory
A system of ideas designed to interrelate concepts and facts in a way that summarizes existing data and predicts future observations.
Who is the father of psychology and why?
Wilhelm Wundt is the father of psychology because he set the first laboratory in 1879 to study conscious experience.
Stimulus
Any physical energy that affects a person and evokes a response.
Introspection
To look inwards; to examine one’s own thoughts, feelings, or sensations.
Who inveted Structuralism?
Edward Titchener
Structuralism
The school of thoughts concerned with analyzing sensations and personal experience into basic elements.
Who founded functionalism?
William James
Functionalism
The school of psychology concerned with how behavior and mental abilities help people to adapt to their environment.
Natural selection
The process by which such forces as competition, disease, and climate tend to eliminate individuals who are less well adapted to a particular environment and favor the survival and reproduction of better adapted individuals, thereby changing the nature of the population over successive generations.
Who invented behaviorism
Watson
Behaviorism
An approach to psychology, formulated in 1913 by John B. Watson, based on the study of objective, observable facts rather than subjective, qualitative processes, such as feelings, motives, and consciousness.
Response
Any muscular actions, glandular activity, or other identifiable aspect of behavior.
Conditioning
A process of learning reaction to a particular stimulus. The process by which certain kinds of experience make particular actions more or less likely.
Who was radical behaviorist?
B. F. Skinner
Cognitive behaviorism
An approach that combines behavioral principles with cognition (perception, thinking, anticipation) to explain behavior.
Who invented Gestalt psychology?
Max Wertheimer
Gestalt psychology
A school of psychology emphasizing the study of thinking, learning, and perception in whole units, not by analysis into parts.
Unconscious
In psychoanalytic theory, the region of the psyche containing memories, emotional conflicts, wishes, and repressed impulses that are not directly accessible to awareness but that have dynamic effects on thoughts and behavior.
Repression
The unconscoius process by which memories, thoughts, or impulses are held out of awareness.
Freudian slip
An unconscious error or oversight in writing, speech, or action that is held to be caused by uneccaptable impulses breaking through the EGO’s defenses and exposing the individual’s true wishes or feelings.
Psychoanalysis
A Freudian approach to psychotherapy emphasazing the exploration of unconscious conflicts.
Non-Freudian
A psychologist who accepts the broad features of Freud’s theory but has revised the theory to fit his or her own concepts.
Psychodynamic theory
Any theory of behavior that emphasize internal conflicts, motives, and unconscious forces.
Humanism
An approach to psychology that focuses on human experience, problems, potentials, and ideals.
Determinism
The idea that all behavior has prior causes that would completely explain one’s choices and actions if all such causes were known.
Free will
The idea that human beings are capable of freely making choices or decisions.
Self-image
Perception of one’s own body, personality, and capabilities.
Self-evaluation
Refers to appraising yourself as good or bad.
A frame of reference
The set of assumptions or criteria by which a person or group judges ideas, actions, and experiences.
Self-actualization
The complete realization of that of which one is capable, involving maximum development of abilities and full involvement in and appreciation for life, particularly as manifest in peak experience.
Peak experience
In the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow, a moment of awe, ecstasy, or sudden insight into life as a powerful unity transcending space, time, and the self.
Gender bias in research
A tendency for females and female issues to be underrepresented in research, psychological or otherwise.
What are the three modern perspectives of psychology?
- biological
- psychological
- sociocultural
Biogolical perspective
The attempt to explain behavior in terms of underlying beiological principles
Biopsychological view
Key idea: Human and animal behavior is the result of internal physical, chemical, and biological processes.
Seeks to explain behavior through activity of the brain and nervous system, physiology, genetics, the endocrine system, and biochemistry; neutral, reductionistic, mechanistic view of human nature.
Evolutionary view
Key idea: Human and animal behavior is the result of the process of evolution.
Seeks to explain behavior through evolutionary principles based on natural selection; neutral, reductionistic, mechanistic view of human nature.
Psychological perspective
The traditional view that behavior is shaped by psychological processes occuring at the level of the individual.
Behavioral view
Key idea: Behavior is shaped and controlled by one’s environment.
Emphasizes the study of observable behavior and the effects of learning; stresses the influence of external rewards and punishments; neutral, scienitific, somewhat mechanistic view of human nature.
Cognitive view
Key idea: Much human behavior can be understood in terms of the mental processing of information.
Concerned with thinking, knowing, percepting, understanding, memory, decision making, and judgment; explains behavior in terms of information processing; neutral, somewhat computer-like view of human nature.
Psychodynamic view
Key idea: Behavior is dericted by forces within one’s personality that are often hidden or unconscious.
Emphasizes internal impulses, desires, and conflicts — especially those that are unconscious; views behavior as the result of clashing forces within personality; somewhat negative, pessimistic view of human nature.
Humanistic view
Key idea: Behavior is guided by one’s self-image, by subjective perceptions of the world, and by needs for personal growth.
Focuses on subjective, conscious experience, human problems, potentials, and ideals; emphasizes self-image and self-actualization to explain behavior; positive, philosophical view of human nature.
Positive Psychology
A field of psychological theory and research that focuses on the psychological states, individual traits or character strengths, and social institutions that enhance subjective well-being and make life most worth living.
Sociocultural perspective
The focus on the importance of social and cultural contexts in influencing the behavior of individuals.
Sociocultural view
Key idea: Behavior is influenced by one’s social and cultural context.
Emphasizes that behavior is related to the social and cultural environment whithin a person is born, grows up, and lives from day to day; neutral, interactionist view of human nature.
Cultural relativism
The view that attitudes, behaviors, values, concepts, and achievements must be understood in the light of their own cultural milieu and do not judged according to the standards of a different culture.
Social norm
Any of the socially determined consensual standards that indicate what behaviors are considered typical in a given context (descriptive norms) and what behaviors are considered proper in the context (injunctive norms).
Experiment
A formal trial undertaken to confrm or disconfrm a hypothesis about cause and effect.
Performance of an Experiment
- Directly vary a condition you think might affect behavior
- Create two or more groups of subjects. These groups should be alike in all ways except the condition you are varying
- Record whether varying the condition has any effect on behavior
Experimental subject
Humans and animals whose behavior is investigated in an experiment.
Experimental group
In a controlled experiment, the group of subjects exposed to the independent variable or experimental condtiion
Control group
In a controlled experiment, the group of subjects exposed to all experimental conditions or variables except the independent variable
A point of reference
A neutral or baseline value that individuals uses as a benchmark for evaluating and comparing potential outcomes, gains and losses.
Random assignment
The use of chance (for example, fipping a coin) to assign subjects to experimental and control groups.
Variable
Any condition that changes or can be made to change; a measure, event, or state that may vary.
Types of variables
- Independent variable — In any experiment, the condition being investigated is a possible cause of some change in behavior. The values that this variable takes are chosen by the experimenter.
- Dependent variable — In an experiment, the condition (usually a behavior) that is affected by the independent variable.
- Extraneous variable — Conditions or factors excluded from infuencing the outcome of an experiment
Statistical signifcance
Experimental results that would rarely occur by chance alone.
Meta-analysis
A statistical technique for combining the results of many studies on the same subject.
Research participant bias
Changes in the behavior of research participants caused by the unintended infuence of their own expectations.
Placebo effect
Changes in behavior due to participant’s expectations that a drug (or other treatment) will have some effect.
Placebo
An inactive substance given in the place of a drug in psychological research or by physicians who wish to treat a complaint by suggestion.
Effect of placebo
Placebos alter our expectations, both conscious und unconcsious, about own emotional and physical reactions. After taking a placebo, there is a reduction in brain activity linked with pain, so the effect is not imaginery.
Researcher bias
Changes in participants’ behavior caused by the unintended influence of a researcher’s actions.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A prediction that prompts people to act in ways that make the prediction come true.
Single-blind experiment
An arrangement in which participants remain unaware of whether they are in the experimental group or the control group.
Double-blind experiment
An arrangement in which both participants and experimenters are unaware of wether participants are in the experimental group or the control group, including who might have been administered a drug or a placebo.
What are kinds of nonexperimental research methods?
- Naturalistic observation
- Correlational study
- Survey method
- The clinical method
Naturalistic observation
Observing behavior as it unfolds in natural settings.
Observational record
A detailed summary of observed events or a videotape of
observed behavior.
Observer bias
The tendency of an observer to distort observations or
perceptions to match his or her expectations.
Anthropomorphic error
The error of attributing human thoughts, feelings, or motives to
animals, especially as a way of explaning their behavior.
Observer effect
Changes in a subject’s behavior brought about by an awareness of being observed.
Experimental method
Investigating causes of behavior through controlled experimentation.
Correlation
The existence of a consistent, systematic relationship between two events, measures, or varibales.
Correlational study
A nonexperimental study designed to measure the degree of relationship (if any) between two or more events, measures, or variables.
Positive correlation
A statistical relationship in which increase in one measure are matched by increase in the other (or decreases correspond with decreases).
Negative correlation
A statistical relationship in which increases in one measure are matched by decreases in the other.
Coefficient of correlation
A statistical index ranging from -1.00 to +1.00 that indicates the direction and degree of correlation.
Representative sampling
The selection of study units (e.g., participants, homes, schools) from a larger group (population) in an unbiased way, such that the sample obtained accurately refects the total population.
Population
- the total number of individuals in any given geographical area.
- in statistics, a theoretically defned, complete group of objects (people, animals, institutions) from which a SAMPLE is draw to obtain empirical observations and to which results can be generalized.
Survey
A study in which a group of participants is selected from a population and data about or opinions from those participants are collected, measured, and analyzed. Information typically is gathered by interview or self-report questionnarie, and the results thus obtained may then be extrapolated to the whole population.
Biased sampling
Selecting individuals or other study units from a population in such a manner that the resulting sample is not representative of the population.
Courtesy bias
Tendency of individuals to provide responses that they
perceive as socially acceptable or “correct”, rather than
revealing their true feelings, attitudes , or behaviors.
Case study
An in-depth investigation of a single individual, family, or other entity. It allows for intensive analysis of an issue, it is limited in the extent to which their findings my be generylized.
Natural clinical test
An accident or other natural event that allows the gathering of data on a psychological phenomenon of interest.
