Chapter 1 Introduction: Principles of Psychology

What is a mainstream psychologist most likely to think about Sigmund Freud?

Freudian theory is untestable and not grounded in science

What mental disorder did Sigmund Freud attribute to the malfunctioning uterus?

Hysteria

cognative psychology

focuses on how people think, remember, store, and use information

A researcher presents his participant with a series of flashing lights at varying intervals. After each presentation of a light, he asks the participant to fully describe her internal experiences, a method known as...

introspection

Psychology

the study of mind and behavior

Neuroscience

the study of the nervous system

A scientist who studied only observable behaviors and stressed the rules of punishments and rewards in learning was

B. F. Skinner

What were the views of Plato and Descartes about the reliability of our senses for understanding the world?

Philosophers like Plato and Renés Descartes believed that the senses offered an unreliable understanding of the world and believed knowledge should be based on logic and reason

Which statement reflects a reasonable attitude for a good student of psychology to have toward any claim about human behavior?

Skepticism is advisable until an idea is proven right

Why did early humans need to pay careful attention to the behavior of others?

-The survival of early humans was dependent on familiarity with animal behaviors. -Early humans hard to know enough about the behavior of other people to remain safely in the groups. Some researchers have speculated that the human brain can only manage social relations with about 150 people.

Which of the following perspectives argues that human behavior develops in certain ways because it serves a useful purpose?

Functionalism

Wilhelm Wundt establish the first Laboratory explicitly designed for psychology experiments. The foundation of the type of rigorous scientific approach he used three originated in ________, or the study of how physical events affect our senses

Psychophysics

The hallmarks of psychology as a science are

careful experimentation and the application of critical thinking

Plato's allegory of the cave indicates that

truths about reality are not always obvious

Which of the following approaches to psychology did Edward Titchener advocate in the late 1800s?

Structuralism

How is natural selection related to psychology?

Humans behave as they do in part because that behavior promotes survival

The group of psychologist who insist that the perception we experience is more than the sum of the parts we know as the ________ psychologists

Gestalt

What does the phrase "tabula rasa" mean, and what philosopher is associated with applying this notion to the human mind?

Empiricist philosophers like John Locke insisted that we get vital information from our senses, and posited it that a person's mind at birth is a tabula rasa that experience can mold to support a wide range of behavior

Four principles of psychology

1. The mind is a product of a physical machine - the brain (Machine like brain) 2. We are consciously aware of only a small part of our mental activity (unconscious processes) 3. We constantly modify our behavior, beliefs, and attitudes according to what we perceive about the people around us (Social influences) 4. Experience physically alters the structure and function of the brain (Experience matters)

Being a member of the group is an important part of human survival. Anthropologist have theorized that humans can keep track of about ________ different human relationships.

150

Functionalism

A broad school of thought in psychology that insisted that mental processes I connect conscious this busters a practical, adaptive purpose William James

What was Charles Darwin's contribution to the science of psychology?

Charles Darwin and his followers proposed that behaviors evolved by natural selection and that the behavior of animals offered important insights into the human mind

When the US Supreme Court considered school integration, findings from the ________ were used to provide evidence regarding racial preferences in children?

Doll test

Plato used a parable to illustrate his skepticism about our senses. In this, he proposed people may only see the ________ of the events occurring in the world

Shadows

Structuralism

The introspective analysis of the human mind by breaking it down into the simplest kind of experience, and then asking how these simple experiences come together to produce more complexes experiences -Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener

Behaviorism

The perspective that psychologist should study only observable behaviors and not subject his mental events Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndlike, and John B Watson

The year 1879 might be thought of as the beginning of psychology as a science because that is the year

Wilhelm Wundt aka "the Father of Psychology" developed and opened the first psychology laboratory

Parents who agree with John Locke's notion of tabula rasa would most likely

expose their children to a rich variety of sensory experiences

An important principle to remember when studying psychology is that...

the act of learning changes the physical structure of the brain

According to the social brain hypothesis, each of us can deal effectively with social interactions with roughly 150 people. This implies that...

we are capable of maintaining social networks of up to 150 people throughout our lives