What is Psychology Lecture One Flashcards
What is Psychology?
• Psychology is the scientific investigation of mental processes (thinking, remembering and feeling) and behaviour. Understanding a person requires attention to the individual’s biology, psychological experience and cultural context.
What is the philosophical issue: Free will versus determination?
Do people make free choices or are their actions determined by forces outside their control? E.g. what causes patients with antisocial personality disorder to produce criminal behaviour?
What is the philosophical issue: Nature versus Nurture?
To what extent do psychological processes reflect biological or environmental influences? E.g. To what extent is intelligence inherited, and how do genes and environment interact to influence intellectual functioning?
What is the philosophical issue: Rationalism versus empiricism?
To what extent does knowledge about the world come from observation and experience or from logic and reasoning? E.g. How do children come to understand that other people have thoughts and feelings?
What is the philosophical issue: Reason versus emotion?
To what extent are people guided by their knowledge or by their feelings (and to what extent should they be)? E.g. Should people choose their mates based on ‘gut’ feelings or should they carefully weigh a potential partners costs and benefits if they want to be a happy long lasting marriage?
What is the philosophical issue:Continuity versus discontinuity with other animals?
To what extent are humans similar to other animals (that is to what extent is human psychology continuous with the psychology of other animals)? To what degree can studying fear responses in primates inform psychologists about the nature of human emotions?
What is the philosophical issue: Individualism versus relationality?
To what extent are humans fundamentally self-interested or oriented towards relating to and helping other people? E.g. Do people ever really help others without any benefit to themselves or are they motivated by other considerations, such as desire to feel good about themselves or avoid guilt?
Philosophical issue: Conscious versus unconscious:
To what extent are people conscious of their mind and the causes of their behaviour? E.g. Can people describe themselves accurately or are they unaware of many aspects of their personality?
Philosophical issue: Mental versus physical:
To what extent can we understand psychological events independent of their neural basis? E.g. How many kinds of memory are there? When we hold a phone number in mind briefly as we reach for the phone, are we using different neural ‘hardware’ than when we store that number ‘for keeps’?
Psychodynamic Perspective
(Sigmund Freud→ Key figures) Basic Principles: Behaviour is largely the result of unconscious processes, motivation and early experiences. Metaphors: Consciousness is like the tip of an iceberg; the mind is like a battleground for warring factions. Methods: Interpretation of verbal discourse, slips of the tongue, dreams, fantasies, actions and postures; case studies; limited experimentation.
Behaviourist Perspective
(B.F. Skinner→ Key figures) Basic Principles: Behaviour is learned and selected by its environmental consequences. Metaphors: Humans and other animals are like machines; the mind is like a black box. Methods: Experimentation with humans and other animals
- Radical Behaviourism: Skinner
- Championed return of watsons (little albert) strict focus on observable behaviour
- Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes and tend to not repeat responses that lead to negative outcomes
- The behaviourist perspective focuses on learning and studies the way environmental events control behaviour. Behaviourists reject the concept of ‘mind’, viewing mental events as the contents of a black box that cannot be known or studied scientifically. Scientific knowledge comes from using experimental methods to study the relationship between environmental events and behaviours.
Humanistic Perspective
(Carl Rogers) Basic Principles: Behaviour and experience are shaped by the need to self-actualise , to fulfil one’s inner potential. Metaphors: Life is like a bottle of mile- the cream always rises to the top. This is an optimistic view of behaviour, emphasising that everyone aims to be the best person they can be. Methods: Person-centred therapeutic approach that emphasises empathy, acceptance and respect for the individual
- Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers
- Humanists take optimistic view of human nature
- Emphasise the unique qualities of humans (swing away from animal experiments)→ People are innately good and so will almost always choose adaptive and self actualising behaviours
Cognitive Perspective
(Rene Descartes→ Early philosophical questions led many cognitive psychologists to emphasise the role of reason in creating knowledge.) Basic Principles: Behaviour is the product of information processing: storage, transformation and retrieval of data. Metaphors: The mind is like a computer; enduring patterns of thought are like software. Methods: Experimentation with humans; computer modelling.
- Behaviour cannot be understood without understanding how we acquire, store and process information
- Focus on the way people perceive, process and retrieve information
Evolutionary Perspective
(Charles Darwin) Psychological processes reflect evolutionary process of natural selection. Metaphors: Life is like a race for survival and reproduction. Methods: Deduction of explanations for traits and behaviours; cross-species and cross-cultural comparisons; limited experimentation
- Personality traits like extraversion are a result of having certain genes that affect our behaviour
Who is Wilhem Wundt?
• Wilhem Wundt (1832-1920)
- Described as the father of psychology
- Founded first psychological laboratory in Germany
- Use scientific methods to uncover elementary units of human consciousness that combine to form more complex ideas
- Methods: Introspection→ the process of looking inward and reporting on one’s conscious experience
- Trained observers to report verbally everything that went through their minds when presented with a stimulus or a task
- Basic elements of consciousness are sensations (e.g. colours) and feelings.
- Never identified that experimentation only route to psychological knowledge
