Psychology Chapter 1 Concepts

reinforcement

an idea under behaviorism that proposes you can change someone's behavior by using reinforcement - produces reliable outcomes of responses to stimulus

behavioral neuroscience

approach to psych that links psychological processes to activities in the nervous system and other bodily processes

group dynamics

are powerful because according to social psychology, there is a strong influence of people around us on the way we think and behave

Lashley

there are general areas, but no "silver spot" for specific skills; the whole brain works at once, and you can record brain activity

the first psychologists - Jean Martin Charcot & Pierre Janet

unconsciousness; hypnosis "spell" (symptoms go away during this); there are two levels of consciousness (people behave differently in the two)

nature vs. nurture

where does human knowledge come from? is knowledge built in? do we acquire knowledge through experience?

Influence of Darwin on functionalism

why do we have psychological processes? To survive and reproduce (very popular in N. America)

problems with behaviorism

B.F Skinner "give me a baby and i'll make him into anything" - behaviorism doubts free will the cognitive revolution brought light to this concept - when kids learn language they speak sentences that they've never heard before, so there must be complex processes in the brain beyond stimulus and response - behaviorism does not account for this (Chomsky)

Rene Descartes

Mind- Body Problem or Dualism - mind and body are seperate

is language "hardwired" or does it depend on experience?

Plato - hardwired. Aristotle - experience. still a debate within psychology...

nativism

Plato believed that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn, or native to the species

Chomsky

argued that behaviorism couldn't really explain how children learning language are able to produce totally new sentences and sometimes even totally new words; if behaviorism is a good theory than it should be able to explain everything, but it's not able to explain internal processes that allow children to produce sentences

Pavlov, Watson, B.F Skinner

behaviorism - there is a link between stimulus + response

B.F. Skinner

behaviorism - wanted to look at decision making; Skinner Box - box with rat and lever with food; these ideas moved away from subjected psychology

Freud

believed early childhood experiences are roots of emotion problems; if we can recall memories from the past we can understand disorders; *psychoanalytic therapy* = bring the unconscious into conscious awareness to better understand psychological disorders, we can be healed; this was a negative approach and also difficult to test

Cognitive Revolution

demise of behaviorism - the mind does more than respond to stimulus - the mind performs complex interpretation and evaluation; interpretation is based on specific people and environment, so behaviorism is over-simplifying real life; So the cognitive revolution is seen as the demise of behaviorism and the main argument again behaviorism is that the mind isn't just a responder to stimuli, it actually interprets data from its environment and interprets it in different ways

Thomas Hobbes

denied that there was any non-material substance of the mind - the physcial brain is not separate from the mind

illusions

errors of perception, memory, judgment: the mind actively generates perceptual experience ex. dreams - brain generates experience

recording brain activity - experiment

experiment - directly controlled the firings of neurons which can be activated using light. surgery on mice and implant "ChR2" to activate the genes that can control the mice. this study progressed a long way technologically

humanistic psychology

focuses on positive side and the potential of human nature

the first psychologists - William James

functionalism - attempt to understand the purpose of consciousness and behavior - led to evolutionary psychology

the first psychologists - G. Stanley Hall

functionalism; influenced by Darwin/ evolutionary thinking; organism's purpose and characteristics to survive

Paul Broca - neuroscience

he studied the brains of aphasic patients (persons with speech and language disorders resulting in brain injury) and discovered that speech production is located in a specific region of the brain (Broca's area)

psychoanalytic theory

importance of unconscious mental processes in shaping feelings, thoughts, and behaviors - needed a medical expert to do this

Aristotle

is associated with Philisophical empiricism - all knowledge is acquired through experience; blank slate or "tabula rasa" meaning you have no knowledge when you're born

a goal of many early psychologists

is to test apart just how much we as humans rely on learned vs. built- in knowledge

Chomsky - starting the cognitive revolution - behaviorism falls

language acquisition is an innate structure or function of the brain

the first psychologists - Helmnotz

measured reaction time; discovered that nerve impulses travel at a finite speed (not instantaneous); predecessor of neuroscience; (toes vs. thigh); tested nerve impulses on frog's legs

Ulric Neisser

memory is not a snapshot rather it is a reconstruction

Festinger and Carlsmith

moved away from philosophy; they wanted to collect actual scientific data and make measurable predictions; 20$ to 1$ experiment

unconscious state experiment example

pictures flashing on computer screen - man with brain damage could not see the left side of the screen; researcher argues that he's observing photos in his unconscious state, he can pull out information that disconnected side of brain recorded

William James

seems like we may have built- in mechanisms for dealing with interactions with the world; BASEBALL VIDEO: some reactions are clearly not built-in (he wasn't born with a glove)

Mgurch effect

shape of mouth experiment (auditory stimulus is related to visual stimulus)

injury to the brain

should affect cognition (Phineas Gage early example demonstrating that our physical bodies were the seat of the mind - railroad worker - iron through left side of brain)

social psychology - Stanley Milgram

sought to explain the horrific events of the past decade(s) in terms of sociality

the first psychologists - Wundt, Titchener

structuralism; eventually died off because relied too much on subjectiveness (introspection) ; unreliable b/c not easy to measure

Social psychology

study of causes and consequences of sociality - the influence of the people around us is great

introspective allusions

the limits of introspective: misrepresented memories, confabulations, unreliable - not a perfect process, perceived different about yourself; A subject is likely to give explanations for their behavior (i.e. their preferences, attitudes, and ideas), but a subject tends to be inaccurate in their insight. The false explanations of their own behavior is the what psychologists call the Introspection illusion.

behaviorism

the reaction to more subjective work (like that of Freud) psychology should restrict itself to measuring behavior, observable, and objective experiences

cognitive psychology

the study of mental processes which include perception, thought, memory, and reasoning

psychoanalysis

therapeutic approach focusing on bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness to better understand psychological disorders