Introduction To Psychology (chapter 1) Flashcards
What is psychology?
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behaviour
What are the two categories people who practice psychology can be broken up into?
- Research psychologists
- Psychologist-practitioners
What do Research psychologists use?
Use scientific methods to create new knowledge about causes of behaviour
What do psychologist-practitioners use?
Use existing research to enhance the everyday life of others
What are Empirical methods?
Include the processes of collecting and organizing data and drawing conclusions about those data
What are scientific methods?
Is the set of assumptions, rules, and procedures that scientists use to conduct empirical research
What are values?
Personal statements
What are facts?
Objective statements determined to be accurate through empirical study
What is Levels of explanation? And what are the three levels?
Levels of explanation is the perspectives that are used to understand behaviour
The three levels are:
Lower levels
Middle levels
Higher levels
What are lower levels of explanation?
More closely tied to biological influences, such as genes, neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones
What are middle levels of explanation?
Refer to the abilities and characteristics of the individual
What are higher levels of explanation?
Relate to social groups, organizations, and cultures
What is the underlying process of lower levels of explanation? What is an example?
Biological
Ex.
- Depression is in part genetically influenced
- Depression is influenced by the action of neurotransmitters in the brain
What is the underlying process of middle levels of explanation? What is an example?
Interpersonal
Ex.
- People who are depressed may interpret the events that occur to them too negatively
- Psychotherapy can be used to help people talk about and combat depression
What is the underlying process of higher levels of explanation? What is an example?
Cultural and social
Ex.
- Women experience more depression than do men
- The prevalence of depression varies across cultures and historical time periods
What are three challenges of studying psychology that make predictions difficult?
- People vary and respond differently in different situations
- Almost all behaviour is multiply determined (produced by many factors). These multiple causes are not independent of one another; they are associated such that when one cause is present, other causes tend to be present as well
- Human behaviour is caused by factors that are outside our conscious awareness, making it impossible for us, as individuals, to really understand them
Who believed in the principle of dualism? And what is dualism?
Rene Descartes, dualism: that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body
Who began the field known as structuralism?
Wundt
Who were the first two research psychologists who helped with the dramatic changes during the 1800s?
- Wilhem Wundt
- William James
What is structuralism?
A school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological experience
What is introspection?
Structuralists used the method of introspection (asking participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks) to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness
What is the school of function?
William James and other members of the school of function aimed to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess
What is evolutionary psychology?
A branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior, the work of functionalists has developed into this field
What is fitness, in regards to evolutionary psychology?
Fitness is the extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic
What is psychodynamic psychology?
An approach to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories
What is psychoanalysis?
A process of talk therapy and dream analysis used to help patients explore unconscious drives
What is behaviourism?
A school of psychology that is based on the premise that is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behaviour itself
What are the three famous behaviourist experiments?
- Pavlov’s dog
- Little Albert
- Skinner box
What is Pavlov’s dog?
Pavlov found that a stimulus (either food, after learning, the tone) would produce the response of salivation in the dogs
What is little Albert?
Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could lead the child to respond with a fearful behavior to the presence of the object
What is Skinner box?
Skinner used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of rewards or reinforcements, to train pigeons and other animals
What is cognitive psychology?
A field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment
What is social-cultural psychology?
Is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour
What are social norms?
An important aspect of social-cultural psychology. Social norms are the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate
What is “culture”?
A culture represents the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region
What the norms between western (__________) cultures and East Asian (___________) cultures
- Individualistic
- Collectivist
What is individualism?
Valuing the self and one’s independence from others
What is collectivism?
Value interdependence and a focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others
