Week 1: Psychology as a Science Flashcards
What is psychology?
from the greek psyche (soul) and logos (to study); the scientific study of mind and behaviour
What is the difference between mind and behaviour?
Mind: a set of private events that happen inside a person; thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories
Behaviour: a set of public events that can be observed by others; the things we say and do
What is philosophical dualism, and who is it associated with?
the view that the mind and body are fundamentally different things (the body is made of material substance and the mind of immaterial substance; a person is a physical container of a nonphysical thing) [Rene Descartes]
What is philosophical materialism, and who is it associated with?
argues that the mind is what the brain does and that they are not two separate entities; the view that all mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena [Thomas Hobbes]
What is philosophical realism, and who is it associated with?
the idea that perceptions of the physical world are produced entirely by information from sensory organs; your body uses ONLY tangible info like light bouncing off an object to produce your perception of the object [John Locke]
What is philosophical idealism, and who is it associated with?
the view that perceptions of the physical world are the brain’s interpretation of information from the sensory organs (light bouncing off an object, PLUS all the other information your brain has about the world is used by the brain to interpret what you are seeing) [Immanuel Kant]
What is philosophical empiricism, and who is it associated with?
the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience; a newborn baby is a tabula rasa and then comes to know things by seeing them, interacting with them, or seeing others interact with them [John Locke]
What is philosophical nativism, and who is it associated with?
the view that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired; space, time, causality, and number.You can’t learn these concepts, but you can’t learn anything else without knowing them, so they must come “pre-programmed” [Immanuel Kant]
Who was Herman von Helmholtz, and what did he contribute to psychology?
scientist in physiology and physics, best known in psychology for contributions to understanding vision and hearing; calculated the speed at which nerves transmit information by measuring reaction time differences between touching someone’s toe and their thigh
Who was Wilhelm Wundt, and what did he contribute to psychology?
Helmholtz’ research assistant who taught the first course in scientific/experimental psychology (Germany,1867), published the first psychology textbook (1874), opened the world’s first psychology laboratory (University of Leipzig, 1879); his approach came to be known as structuralism
What is structuralism?
an approach to psychology that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind’s basic elements (like how natural scientists had understood the physical world by breaking it down into cells/molecules/atoms)
Who was Edward Titchener, and what did he contribute to psychology?
Wundt’s student who pioneered “systematic self-observation” (introspection); taught research assistants to “report on the contents of their moment to moment experience” in a “raw” way, not with their interpretation; believed carefully analyzing these reports would let him discover the basic building blocks of subjective experience (ex. The 3 basic dimensions of sensation- pleasure/pain, strain/relaxation, excitation/quiescence)
Who was William James, and what did he contribute to psychology?
introduced to psychology by Wundt but did not believe in structuralism (thought of subjective experience as more a “stream of consciousness” that was useless to try and isolate into basic elements, wanted to know what mental life was for more than what it was like; developed functionalism with John Dewey (1959-1952) and James Agnell (1869-1949)
What is functionalism?
an approach to psychology that emphasized the adaptive significance of mental processes (adaptive significance: James believed consciousness evolved through natural selection as Darwin had described for physical characteristics
What did the physicians Charcot and Janet contribute to psychology?
encountered patients with a variety of symptoms (blindness, paralysis, amnesia) but no obvious physical illness/injury; under hypnosis the patients’ symptoms disappeared and reappeared afterwards (referred to as hysteria, a loss of function that has no obvious physical origin); Freud did a fellowship with Charcot
What did Watson believe about psychology?
psychology would be a real science if it limited itself to studying things people do (observation, like with rats) rather than what they claim to think/feel; developed behaviourism
What is behaviourism?
an approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behaviour
What did B.F. Skinner contribute to psychology?
inspired by Watson and Pvalov, created the “Skinner Box” in which a rat had to pull a lever for food and the frequency of lever presses were recorded; the rat would first accidentally press the lever and get food then gradually start pressing the lever on purpose (learned to operate on their environments as opposed to monitor them like pavlov’s dogs)
What is the principle of reinforcement?
any behaviour that is rewarded will be repeated and any behaviour that isn’t won’t (rats who didn’t get food when pressing the lever wouldn’t press the lever)
What did Max Wertheimer contribute to psychology?
did experiments about how people percieve motion in which two dots flashed on a screen, one after the other; when there was a longer time between flashes people said there were to separate dots but when there was about 1/5th of a second less time they percieved it to be 1 dot that had moved; “illusory motion” like this happens becase the mind has theories about how the world works (ex. When something is in one place and then instantly in another, it probably moved; same idea as philosophical idealism). Wertheimer concluded that physical stimuli are just 1 part of a perceptual experience and that the whole experience is more than the sum of its parts
What is Gestalt psychology?
an approach to psychology that emphasized the way in which the mind creates perceptual experience (Wertheimer; Gestalt = whole in German)
What did Frederic Bartlett contribute to psychology?
discovered that, when asked to read a story and then recall it minutes to years later, people often remembered things that didn’t happen (what they expected to read rather than what they actually read; tendency became more pronounced with the passage of time)
What did Jean Piaget contribute to psychology?
concluded that the mind has theories about how the world works, but that children have not yet learned these theories and so they see the world in a fundamentally different way than adults do (ex. Children under 6 or 7 believing that when a ball of clay changes shape it also changes mass; a “log” has more clay than a ball of equal mass)
What is developmental psychology?
the study of the ways in which psychological phenomena change other the lifespan (Piaget, Vygotsky 1896-1934)
Who was Kurt Lewin, and what did he contribute to psychology?
fled Europe while Hitler was in power in the 1930s and went to America; started the Institure for Group Dynamics to study leadership, communication, attitude change, racial prejudice. Believed “behaviour is not a function of the environment, but of the person’s subjective construal of the environment”; responses depend more on what a person thinks of a stimuli than the actual stimuli itself
What is social psychology?
the study of the causes and consequences of sociality (Lewin)
What did Solomon Asch contribute to psychology (what “effect” did he describe)?
told people about either a man who was “envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent” or “intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious”; people liked the second man more. PRIMACY EFFECT = the mind uses the earlier words in the list to interpret the later ones (so he’s intelligent and industrious… stubborn probably just means he sticks to his principles)
What critiques did Noam Chomsky have of behaviourist principles of learning?
- children create new sentences they have never heard before using grammar; there are infinite ways to create a sentence but only some are right, and it is a statistical improbability that children would put the right words together by chance
- “If the study of language is limited in these ways, it seems inevitable that major aspects of verbal behaviour will remain a mystery”
What was ENIAC?
first general purpose digital computer, built in 1945; gave psychologists permission once again to think about how the mind works (you can see how a computer “thinks”; it contains circuits, etc. And not a soul that from the outside seem to create thought. Why couldn’t there be an explanation like this for the brain?) if the brain is hardware, the mind is software
What did John Garcia contribute to psychology?
noticed rats associated the food they recently ate (developed an aversion) with symptoms of radiation sickness, but never a light/buzzer/etc. According to Pavlov/behaviourism in general any two stimuli should be able to be paired; it wasn’t supposed to matter if it made sense. Garcia concluded that organisms evolve to respond to particular stimuli in a particular way; they are biologically prepared to learn some associations more easily than others
What did E.O. Wilson contribute to psychology?
wrote a book in 1975 supporting Garcia’s idea, using many areas of science as evidence, that social behaviour is shaped by natural selection; in the final chapter he mentioned the possible application ot humans, which got criticism like he was offering a biological justification for racism/sexism (he wasn’t) but also got interest from psychologists who thought the best way to understand the mind might be to know the specific problems it was “designed” to solve
Who was Donald Hebb, and what phrase did he coin related to neuroscience?
worked with Penfield; one of the first grad students of McGill’s department of psychology; “neurons that fire together wire together” (learning and memory)
What is the difference betwen cognitive and behavioural neuroscience?
Cognitive neuroscience: study of the relationship between the brain and the mind, especially in humans
Behavioural neuroscience: study of the relationship between the brain and behaviour, especially in non-human animals
What did Wilder Penfield contribute to psychology?
founded the Montreal Neurological Institute in the 1920s, pioneered the surgical removal of brain tissue to relieve seizure disorders; 1891-1976; discovered that stimulating different areas of the brain in awake patients brought different mental functions and behaviours
Who was Brenda Milner, and what did she contribute to psychology?
studied under Hebb; most well known for the discovery of the basis of long-term memory in the hippocampus
What is culture?
the values, traditions, and beliefs shared by a particular group of people; can be in terms of nationalist, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, occupation, socioeconomic status, and any other dimension on which people differ
What is anthropology?
the study of human societies and cultures
What is cultural psychology?
the study of how culture influences mental life; research the in the last few decades have shown the influences to be profound (ex. Westerners processing visual info analytically [more in the foreground] due to an individualistic society and Easterners processing info holistically [more in the background] due to a collectivist society
Who founded the APA?
William James and 6 other American psychologists
Which field do most PhD psychologists work in?
Clinical psychology
What is dogmatism?
peoples’ tendency to cling to their beliefs and assumptions
What is the scientific method?
A procedure for using empirical evidence to establish facts; a set of rules for how we observe reality
What are scientific theories?
hypothetical explanations of natural phenomena; good theories give rise to hypotheses that could be falsified
What is a hypothesis?
a falsifiable prediction made by a theory
What 3 qualities make people hard to study?
- People are complex
- People are variable (no two people do, say, think, or feel the exact same things)
- People are reactive (people think, feel, and act differently when they are observed)
What two things must we do before we measure something?
- Define the property we want to measure
2. Find a way to detect that property
