Week 1 INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY Flashcards
What factors impact adjustment to post-secondary education and predict success?
Loneliness: separation from family, high school ect.
Financial stress: faced with debt, the need to reduce expenses, and/or needing to increase income
Class format: university classes large, somewhat impersonal, and have less structure than a typical high school classroom
Freedom: Most students have much more independence. With freedom and flexibility comes the need to regulate key aspects of your life, including sleep, diet, study schedule, and exercise.
Social opportunities: University involves meeting new people. Leads to forming new peer groups and relationships. Choose whether or not to engage in certain recreation activities, and more broadly, how to balance one’s work life and social life.
Personal and emotional problems: Questioning one’s purpose, self-worth, relationships, etc. Can also contribute to emotional turmoil and personal crises
Define trigger warnings and describe the existing evidence for why they are not used in Principles of Psychology.
DEFINITION: advanced notifications that notify viewers/readers of particular topics
possibly upsetting that will be mentioned
Not utilised in PSYC100 because:
▪ Often has no positive impact OR negative impact to student well-being
▪ Can lead to the avoidance of course material, thereby hindering knowledge
comprehension
▪Removes the opportunity to experience perceived “triggers”
▪Principle of exposure is a common treatment for PTSD
▪May provide a predisposed negative connotation to a particular topic
Strategies to overcoming emotional challenges?
▪ understanding ahead of time that the course
▪ may cover emotionally-draining topics ▪ coping & mental hygiene
▪ self-care techniques
What are the key characteristics of the scientific approach?
Systematic observation: observation of the natural world to better understand. Observations are to track and tally data
Hypothesis: observation and theories based on systematic observations
Democracy: Best data wins the argument. Scientists allow open discussions about their observations.
Culmination: Built on previous discoveries and move them farther along the path of knowledge.
What are the ethical guidelines that psychologists follow?
Informed consent:
participants should know what the study is about and understand what will happen to them during the study.
Confidentiality:
Info that researchers learn about the participants must be not made public without participants consent.
Privacy:
Researchers cannot go to participants private areas of life (ie. bedroom, phone & school principles) without them knowing.
Benefits:
good things/outcomes of the study should outweigh the risks.
Deception:
Sometimes misleads the participant about the experiment’s purpose to make sure they don’t alter their behavior which is what they would do if they were to know the true meaning of the study. But, MUST debrief patients/tell them everything you can.
How has psychological science improved the world?
Cognitive behavioural therapy:
indicates good and bad treatments for particular illnesses & disorders
Organizational psych:
increasing productivity and safer/more satisfaction in workplaces
Forensic psych:
more fair decisions made when psychological findings considered as eyewitness accounts can be unreliable
What is the difference between conclusions based on scientific and everyday inductive reasoning?
Inductive (mostly everyday) - seeing a trend and making a generalization
Deductive (scientific) - taking factual data and making other facts about it
Why are scientific conclusions and theories trustworthy, even if they are not able to be proven?
Features of scientific thinking?
Accuracy- explanations and theories match real world observations
Consistency- A theory has a few exceptions
Scope- explains a wide range of phenomena
Simplicity- when there are multiple explanations, the simplest one must be chosen
Fruitfulness- usefulness of a theory guide new research
Falsifiability- capacity for some proposition, statement, theory or hypothesis to be proven wrong
Inductive reasoning: DEF
specific observations leading to general conclusion (EX. texted while drove and ran the red light ∴ text while driving is dangerous)
Deductive reasoning: DEF
(associated better with proof) use general premise/idea to form a specific concussion (EX. all birds have feathers. Ducks are birds ∴ they have feathers)
Representative: DEF
degree to which a sample properly exemplifies (gives good example of) the population
Anecdotal evidence: derived from personal experience (eg. common sense)
Null Hypothesis: DEF
statement that two variables are unrelated
Alternative hypothesis: DEF
statement that two variables are somehow related
Ways research conclusions could go wrong?
Type 1 error & Type 2 error
Type 1 error: (DEF)
researcher concludes there IS a relationship but there isn’t. (Rejecting the null hypothesis but it’s true)(saying that the bad implied thing is wrong but its right and there actually isn’t a relationship)
Type 2 error: (DEF)
when the data fails to show a relationship between 2 variables that actually do exist. (Null hypothesis is said to be true but actually isn’t)
Probability values(p-values): (DEF)
to establish whether something happens by chance. When P-value is less than 0.05, means that probably didnt happen by chance and needs to/can be researched more.
What do good scientific theories need?
need to be empirically (observably) tested and possibly falsified
Levels of analysis: (DEF)
idea that a single phenomenon may be explained at different levels simultaneously
Causality: (DEF)
Determining that one variable affects another
Empiricism: (DEF)
all knowledge comes from experience (John Locke & Thomas Reid)
Neural impulse: (DEF)
electrochemical signal enables neurons to communicate (Hermann von Helmholtz)
Our senses can deceive us and are not a mirror of the external world
Psychophysics: (DEF)
study of relationships between physical stimuli and the human perception of those stimuli (Weber & Fechner)
Introspection:
method of focusing on internal processes
Consciousness:
awareness of ourselves and environment
Structuralism:
elements of the mind/conscious experience
Functionalism:
what the mind does/ utility of consciousness
Individual differences:
behavioral/cognitive ways people differ from one another
Eugenics:
practice of selectively breeding certain desirable traits
Gestalt psychology:
attempt to study the unity of experience (Max Wertheimer)
Cognitive psychology:
study of mental processes
Behaviorism:
study of behavior
Flashbulb memory:
highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally significant event
Scientist-practitioner model:
model of training of professional psychologists that emphasizes the development of bath research and clinical skills
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon:
inability to pull a word from memory even though there is a sensation that the word is available
Anecdotal evidence: (DEF)
derived from personal experience (eg. common sense)
