Chapter 1 Psychology

Thomas Hobbes

Argued against Descartes. Argued that the mind and body are not different at all. The mind is what the brain does.

Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner

Develops the Skinner box or conditioning chamber to explain learning and founded operant conditioning. Published The Behavior of Organism, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Walden ll. •Organisms learn to behave in certain ways because they have been reinforced for doing so. Reinforcement- consequences of a behavior that determine whether it will be more likely that the behavior will occur again In principle, complex human behavior is explained by thousands of instances of learning through REINFORCEMENT.

Max Wertheimer

Gestalt psychology- a psychological approach which emphasizes that we often perceive the whole rather than the sum of the parts. according to this psychology, the mind imposes organization on what it perceives. During perception, the mind brings elements together and combines them into unified whole Illusions: errors of perception, memory, or judgement in which subjective experience differs from objective reality.

Stimulus-response (S-R) psychology

The building blocks of behaviorism

APA (American Psychological Association)

created by William James and six other psychologists who believed their should be an organization to represent psychology as a profession. •At first, APA has mostly white men, but the amount of women and minorities are growing exponentially

Hermann Von Helmholtz

developed a method for measuring the speed of nerve impulses. He recorded reaction times- the amount of time taken to respond to a specific stimulus. He concluded that it takes longer for the nerve impulse to travel from the toe to the brain than from the thigh to the brain because the toe is farther away from the brain.

Noam Chomsky

did not agree with Skinner's unwillingness to talk about the mind had led him to misunderstand the nature of human language. Chomsky pointed out that even young children generate sentences they have never heard before and therefore could not possibly be learning language by reinforcement. Children possess an innate system of language called universal grammar which predisposes them to general linguistic properties of any language. Child learns language without explicit teaching of the rules of grammar.

Donald Broadbent

discovered attention has limited capacity/ fundamental feature of human cognition.

Evolutionary Psychology

explains mind and behavior in terms of adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over time by natural selection, roots in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. •behaviors that increase your chances of survival are favored over those that decrease the behavior •believe our inherited tendencies move us in certain direction (individuals die, but species tend to evolve in adaptive directions) Contrary to comparisons of the brain to a computer that can do everything easily, evolutionary psychologists believe that the brain is a computer that can do some things well and everything else not as well.

Francis Cecil Sumner

first African American to receive a PhD in Psychology. taught a class at Howard University (Kenneth Clark took her class as an undergraduate)

Kenneth Clark

first minority to be president of APA, and studied how segregation created great psychological harm. He had a large influence on the public and was a part of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling (Brown v. Board of Education)

Mary Whiton Calkins

first woman to serve as president of APA. Claimed that the "self" is a single unit that cannot be broken down into individual parts. Taught at Wellesley

George Miller

found consistency in capacity limits in memory/ we can pay attention and hold in memory about 7 pieces of info.

Dualism

how mental activity can be reconciled and coordinated with physical behavior. How come when the body steps on a rusty nail, does the mind say "Ouch!"?

Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers

humanistic psychology- an approach to understanding human nature that emphasizes the positive potential of human beings. Called therapist and client instead of psychoanalyst and patient. Equal footing

Sigmund Freud

hysteria was caused by painful childhood experiences that the patient could not remember. These memories resided in the unconscious- a part of the mind that operates outside of awareness but influences thoughts, feelings, and actions. He then developed psychoanalytic theory- an approach that emphasizes the importance of unconscious material in shaping feelings, thoughts and behaviors, which formed the basis for a therapy he called psychoanalysis- therapeutic approach that focuses on bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness to better understand psychological disorders. He was controversial because he looked at the darker side of science.

Nature vs. Nurture

Nature •Nativism: philosophical view that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn •Plato was a nativist who believed that certain kinds of knowledge are innate •Nurture •Philosophical empiricism: philosophical view that all knowledge is acquired through experience •Aristotle believed that the mind is a blank slate on which experiences are written The main difference is that whereas Plato and Aristotle were quite good at formulating positions, they couldn't settle their debates because they had no objective means of testing those positions.

Mind

private inner experience, memories of perceptions emotions thoughts and feelings

John Broadus Watson

proposed that psychologists should focus on behavior (what people do versus what people say) because behavior can be measured reliably and objectively while verbal reports can be tampered with. •Observable by means of specialized instruments such as heart rate, blood pressure, and brain waves.

Response

reaction to the stimulus

Cognitive Psychology

scientific study of mental processes, including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning. Cognitive psychologists study those thing people refer to as the mind (how we learn, recall the past, plan for the future, solve problems, form judgements, make decisions, and use language). Developed as a field, in part, due to invention of computer (1950). The mind is similar to the computer (inputs, stores, and retrieves info) •Emergence of computers led to reemergence of interest in mental processes all across the discipline of psychology. the book Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner also helped to propel the study of cognitive psychology because it provided behaviorists analysis of language.

Psychology

scientific study of mind and behavior (psyche- soul, mind, brain, logos- the study of the mind)

Stimulus

sensory input from the environment

G. Stanley Hall

set up first psychological laboratory in North America, focused on development and education. Founded American Journal of Psychology

Psychology Roots

since late 1800's when "new science" was separated from principles such as biology, philosophy, and medicine. In other ways it has been around as long as human beings have been discussing human beings.

Paul Broca

studied brain damaged patients (left frontal lobe) to link localization to ability. Had the crucial insight that damage to a specific part of the brain impaired a specific mental function, clearly demonstrating that the brain and mind are closely linked.

Jean Martin Charcot

studied patients with hysteria. It was temporary loss of cognitive or motor functions, usually as a result of emotionally upsetting experiences. NO OBVIOUS PHYSICAL CAUSE. Observed that with use of hypnosis, the patients acted differently and their ailments were fixed when in the trancelike state.

Karl Lashley

studied with John Watson, created a study where he trained rats to run mazes, removed parts of their brains, and then measured how well they could run the maze again, hoping to find the spot where learning occurred. The more brain he removed, the more poorly the rat did, which frustrated him because he could not figure out why. Later, scientists developed an area called physiological psychology, or behavioral neuroscience- an approach to psychology that links psychological processes to activities in the nervous system and other bodily processes. But, because it is unethical to for experimental brain surgery to be done on human beings, non invasive brain scanning was later created in order to see how the brain works without the need of going into a live human's head. The name for this area of research is cognitive neuroscience- a field of study that attempts to understand the links between cognitive processes and brain activity.

Physiology

study of biological processes, especially in human body

Cultural Psychology

study of how cultures reflect and shape the psychological processes of their members. Ranging from visual perceptions to social interactions. examine behavior within the broader context of human interaction •emphasis that culture, ethnicity, environment, and gender are the essential to understanding behavior thought and emotion (i.e Kenneth Clark)

Behaviorism

the idea that psychology should restrict itself to studying objectively observable behavior. Dramatic departure from previous schools of thought.

Social Psychology

the study of the causes and consequences of the sociality •psychologists are influenced by the presence or absence of people •Historical events: The Holocaust (conformity and obedience) and the Civil rights movement (prejudice, racism, and stereotyping)

Wilhelm Wundt

was a student of Helmholtz. He taught the first formal course in psychology in 1867 at the University of Heidelberg, and opened the first psychology laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig. He believed in focusing on consciousness- a person's subjective experience of the world and the mind. He developed an approach to psychology known as structuralism- the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. He constructed experiments using introspection- a method that asks people to report on their subjective experience. Subjective observation of one's own experience- consists of 3 basic elements; sensation-feeling-images that combine to form experience.

William James

: First to use scientific approach to study psychology. A pioneer in psychology who devoted his life to philosophy and psychology. He wrote the book Principles of Psychology, and is considered an influential person in the field. focused on the relation between conscious experiences and behavior. Cannot be broken down into objective sensation and subjective feelings. functionalism- the study of the purpose that mental processes serve. Studies how mental abilities allow people to adapt to their environment

Rene Descartes

French philosopher who argued that body and mind are fundamentally different things, the body is made of a material substance, whereas the mind or soul is made of an immaterial or spiritual substance. Argued for dualism between mind and body.

fMRI

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows scientists to scan a brain to determine which parts are active when a person reads a word, sees a face, learns a new skill, or remembers a personal experience

Behavior

observable actions of humans being and nonhuman animals (how you act) •Cognitive: distorted patterns of thinking