Psych Perspectives Flashcards
Behaviour
overt or observable actions (what the person is doing- obvious and measurable)
Mental processes
thoughts (memories, imagery concepts), emotions (fear, happiness, anger, arousal), interactions between the two (e.g. decision making depends on particular thoughts and emotions).
Goals of Scientific Psychology
Description of behaviour using observations
Predictions to allow for specifications of conditions under which behaviour will or will not occur
Explanation identifying the causes of behaviour (what best enables me to learn features of the world)
Facilitating changes in behaviour (e.g. therapy)
Science vs Common Sense
Science needs some clearly observable data rather than subjective data
Needs to have systematic observations (create an experiment) not a hit or miss observation
Reliance on evidence (to generate explanations/hypotheses). Doesn’t ignore counterevidence.
Effective learning
After experimenting, found 2 ways which work the best
- Self testing/repeated testing and quizzing
- Distributed practice over time
What may also work:
- Elaborative interrogation
- Self-explanation: How do I know that that’s the case
- Interleaved practice: mixing apples and oranges (doing a few subjects at the one time)
Myths in education
- We only use 10% of our brain
- Left brain and right brain people differ
Brain of males and females differ in ways that dictate learning abilities
- Left brain and right brain people differ
Not effective learning
Highlighting or underlining
Re-reading
Imagery for text etc.
Things we can learn from psychology that we wouldn’t otherwise know
Our capacity to self-reflect and use that for what we’re seeing or perceiving is quite poor. (we don’t really observe what’s happening around us)
Beginning of psych
Psych emerged as part of philosophy but defined itself as an empirical science (we manipulate scenarios and variables to make sure we know what’s going on)
Early assumption was that…
The goal of psychology was to understand structure/content of the mind.
Introspection
‘looking inwards’ to one’s own conscious experience
Wilhelm Wundt trained observers to report on their experiences under different experimental conditions. (describe what is going on in their head)
Introspection failed bc people’s self reports were unreliable and everyone says very different things about what is in their heads
Functionalism
a more successful approach- William James emphasised this
E.g. attention serves to highlights and focus analysis on certain stimuli
Functionalism focuses on identifying rules or steps by which a particular task is achieved not on the underlying mechanism. (like computer algorithm and software)
Behaviourism
One of the early challenges to introspection (they didn’t care about whats in the head)
Argues that subjective experience could not be verified by an objective observer
Only study of observable behaviour qualified as scientific
radical behaviourism
Only the study of observable behaviour qualified as scientific
Internal states (thoughts and emotions) are unobservable and thus is not part of scientific psych
methodological behaviourism
Acceptable to study internal states (thoughts or emotions) as long as these can be linked to observable behaviours
This approach underlies much of modern Cognitive Psych and Associative Learning
Psychoanalysis
another challenge to introspection.
Freud argued that many important psychological events are unconscious.
Psych in the brain
We know that psych processes depend on physical activity in brain. But we can’t just focus on neurotransmitters and neurons.
Its also about emotions and memory which cannot be ‘seen’ in the brain
But if we already have a psychological process defined, we can examine brain activity while we manipulate that process
The better our functional understanding of the psychological process, the better we can identify the neural mechanisms responsible for the various steps in that process
Psych as a natural science
empirical: based on systematic observations
Experiments: manipulate one variable to observe effects on another with everything else controlled.
Analysis: determine conclusion that can be drawn
Theory- generate predictions and summarise existing knowledge
Public: results are reviewed by others (peer reviewed)
Bad news about psych
Psychology won’t teach you mind-reading, psychic healing, palm reading etc.
Good news about psych
Tell you about principles of behaviour that are supported by evidence
Current understanding of mechanisms underlying normal and dysfunctional behaviour
How to do research into behaviour and experience
Practical and effective methods for promoting desirable behaviour and reducing distress
Help you develop skills that are highly sought after by employers (problem solving, interpersonal skills, programming, time management etc.)
