Peter Gray's Psychology: Chapter 1

Three fundamental ideas of psychology (before psych was a recognized scientific discipline)

1. Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes 2. A person's experiences modify the way that person behaves, thinks, and feels 3. The body's machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences, is a product of evolution by natural selection

Dualism

A view that states that the body is part of the natural world and can be studied scientifically; by contrast, the soul is a supernatural entity that operates according to its own free will

Science

All attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical analysis of objectively observable data

Mind

An individual's sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotions, and other subjective experiences; also refers to all of the unconscious knowledge and operating rules that are built into or stored in the brain

Contiguity

Closeness in space or time

Wilhelm Wundt

Considered the founder of psychology as a formal, recognized, scientific discipline in 1879, when he opened the first university-based psychology laboratory. He also authored the first psych textbook

Natural selection

Darwin's fundamental idea that living things evolve gradually, over generations

François Magendie

Demonstrated that nerves entering the spinal cord contain two separate pathways: one for carrying messages from the skin 's sensory receptors into the central nervous system, and one for carrying messages out to operate muscles

Levels of analysis

Different levels at which a person's behavior or mental experiences can be examined: 1. Neural 2. Genetic 3. Evolutionary 4. Learning 5. Cognitive 6. Social 7. Cultural 8. Developmental

Developmental level

Eighth level of analysis; age-related changes as cause

Thomas Hobbes

English philosopher who argued that spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept; nothing exists but matter and energy (materialism); published Leviathan and Human Nature

Cognitive level

Fifth level of analysis; an individual's knowledge or beliefs as cause

Neural level

First level of analysis; brain as cause

Learning level

Fourth level of analysis; prior experiences with the environment as cause

René Descartes

French mathematician, physiologist, and philosopher who believed in a form of dualism: even complex behaviors can occur through purely mechanical means, so the only function of the soul is thought; suggested that the soul acted on the body through the pineal gland in the brain

Pierre Flourens

French scientist who performed experiments on animals to show that damage from different parts of the brain produces different kinds of deficits in animals' abilities to move

Paul Broca

French scientist who published evidence that people who suffer injury to a very specific area of the brain's left hemisphere lost the ability to speak but do not lose other mental abilities

Johannes Müller

German scientist who proposed the idea that the different qualities of sensory experience come about because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain

a posteriori knowledge

Knowledge that Kant claimed is gained from experience in the environment

a priori knowledge

Knowledge that Kant claimed is inborn in the human mind

Charles Darwin

Proposed the idea of natural selection; argued that the basic forms of human emotional expressions are inherited, as are those of other animals; the innate mechanisms underlying human emotions, drives, perception, learning, and reasoning came about gradually because they promote the survival and reproduction of our ancestors

I. M. Sechenov

Russian physiologist who supported reflexology; claimed that all human actions are initiated by stimuli in the environment

Genetic level

Second level of analysis; genes as cause

Cultural level

Seventh level of analysis; one's culture as cause

Social level

Sixth level of analysis; influence of others as cause

Clinical psychology

Specialty concerned with helping people who have mental disorders or less serious psychological problems

Personality psychology

Specialty concerned with normal differences in peoples' general ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving (personality traits)

Abnormal psychology

Specialty concerned with variations in psychological traits that are sufficiently extreme and disruptive to peoples' lives as to be classified as mental disorders

Evolutionary psychology

Specialty that attempted to explain how universal human characteristics came about in the course of evolution

Cognitive psychology

Specialty that attempts to explain any behavioral action or mental experience by relating it to the cognitions that underlie that action or experience; experience in the environment leads to change in knowledge or beliefs, which leads to a change in behavior

Social pressure

Specialty that attempts to explain behavior in terms of conformity to social norms, or obedience to authority, or living up to others' expectations

Behavioral genetics

Specialty that attempts to explain psychological differences between individuals in terms of differences in their genes

Developmental psychology

Specialty that documents and describes the typical age differences that occur in the ways that people feel, think, and act

Cultural psychology

Specialty that explains mental experiences and behavior in terms of the culture in which a person develops

Behavioral neuroscience

Specialty that focuses on how the nervous system produces the specific type of experience or behavior being studied

Learning psychology

Specialty that is most directly and exclusively concerned with explaining behavior in terms of learning

Empiricism

The idea that human knowledge and thought derive ultimately from sensory experience; championed by such English philosophers as John Locke, David Hartley, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, who argued that thoughts are not a product of free will, but rather reflections of a person's experiences in the physical and social environment; the opposite of nativism

Law of Association by contiguity

The most basic operating principle of the mind's machinery, according to the empiricists; originally proposed by Aristotle; states that if a person experiences two stimuli at the same time or contiguously, those two thoughts will become associated in that person's mind

Behavior

The observable actions of a person or an animal

Psychology

The science of behavior and the mind

Social psychology

The specialty that focuses on identifying how one's mental experiences and behavior are influenced by others or by one's beliefs about others; aka social cognition

Sensory psychology

The study of basic abilities to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste the environment

Perceptual psychology

The study of how people and animals interpret the input they receive through their senses

Reflexology

The view that all human behavior occurs through reflexes; even so-called voluntary actions are actually complex reflexes involving higher parts of the brain; promoted by Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov

Materialism

The view that nothing exists but matter and energy; the concepts of "spirit" or "soul" are meaningless

Nativism

The view that the most basic forms of human knowledge and the basic operating characteristics of the mind are native to the human mind, or inborn; the opposite of empiricism, championed by such German thinkers as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Immanuel Kant

Evolutionary level

Third level of analysis; natural selection as cause

Observations of behavior

What most of the data in psychology are based on