Psych Midterm Flashcards
(81 cards)
Empiricism
View that knowledge arises directly from what we observe and experience
Who best described Mind-Body Dualism?
René Descartes
What is Abnormal psychology research interested in?
Explaining how and why unusual and maladaptive behavior patterns develop by examining thoughts and emotions as well as the underlying biology of mental illness.
What is Behavioral genetics interested in?
Attempts to explain individual differences in behavior patterns in terms of variation in genetic structure and expression.
What is Cognitive psychology interested in?
How people process information and includes areas such as attention, perception, memory, problem solving, language, and thought.
What is Comparative psychology interested in?
The behavior of non-human animals, and it is often (but not always) interested in making a comparison to human psychology in an effort to discover underlying universals.
What is Developmental psychology interested in?
The way that people develop across the lifespan, including how our thoughts and behaviors change as we age
What is Behavioral neuroscience interested in?
Tries to understand how specific brain regions or activities produce behavior, allowing psychologists to understand the physical underpinnings of their observations.
What is Personality psychology interested in?
Individual differences, investigating how and why people act differently based on their enduring characteristics or traits.
What is Social psychology interested in?
How an individual’s thoughts and actions are influenced by the social environment and the presence of others
What is the major focus of applied psychology?
To solve practical problems
What is the difference between applied research and applied practice?
Research = done to discover a new or more effective way to solve some specific problem
Practice = actual application of techniques to the problems themselves
What is translational research?
The effort to translate basic findings into practical solutions. The distinction between translational and applied research can be confusing at first. Translational research is applied research, but it is necessarily based on an attempt to apply discoveries from basic research to practical problems.
Define clinical psychology
Focuses on identifying, preventing, and relieving distress or dysfunction that is psychological in origin
Whereas clinical psychologists tend to diagnose and treat more severe forms of mental illness, ___________ generally focus on helping people deal with ongoing life problems or stressors, or dealing with the transition from one life situation to another
Counseling psychologists
Clinical psychologists are often contrasted with ______, who are medical doctors that focus on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
Psychiatrists
A contrasting position to empiricism is ______, which hypothesizes that some forms of knowledge are innate. Taken to its logical extreme, this position is called ________.
nativism, biological determinism
Popular in the early nineteenth century, ______ made the case that the shape of the skull was the result of the size of brain structures beneath it
Phrenology
Who is the founding father of modern psychology who also established the first psychological laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig in Germany?
Wilhem Wundt
Where introspection simply considered experiences of one individual, the process of ______ attempted to standardize the way conscious experiences were reported so that one person’s experiences could be compared to another’s more effectively.
systematic introspection
Titchener popularized the approach of breaking conscious experience into elementary parts, a movement in psychology that came to be known as ______
structuralism
Who was the founding father of American psychology?
William James
The position that psychologists must first understand the function of a behavior or mental process to understand how its parts work together is called ______?
functionalism
What movement is being defined by the following statement?
An approach to psychology that suggest observable behaviour should be the only topic of study, ignoring conscious experience.
Behaviourism
