Chapter 1: What is psychology?

Functionalism

The position that psychologists must first understand the function of a behavior or mental process in order to understand how its parts work together is called functionalism, and its proponents functionalists.

humanistic psychology

A response to Freud's dark view of the human condition and behaviorism's focus on mechanistic behavior. It proposes that people have free will and the capacity to realize their own potential. Further, it focuses on positive aspects of the human condition, including creativity, choice, and the potential for growth

Abnormal psychology

Basic research specialty, research is interested in explaining how and why unusual and maladaptive behavior patterns develop by examining thoughts and emotions as well as the underlying biology of mental illness

B. F. Skinner

Behavior can be modified based off of rewards

Behavioral genetics

Behavioral genetics research attempts to explain individual differences in behavior patterns in terms of variation in genetic structure and expression

Behavioral neuroscience

Behavioral neuroscience (sometimes "cognitive neuroscience" or "neuropsychology") makes an effort to understand how specific brain regions or activities produce behavior, allowing psychologists to understand the physical underpinnings of their observations

Edward Titchener

Believed that psychology should focus on decomposing immediate conscious experience into its basic elements and understanding how those elements combine to create experience

Tabula rasa

Blank slate - used to describe the mind by Aristotle

More research opportunities

By returning the focus of psychology to the scientific understanding of mind, many more avenues of research blossomed in psychology.

natural selection

Charles Darwin, he reasoned that adaptive traits tend to spread throughout a population because of the benefits they provide. These inherited traits could also extend to behavioral tendencies, including human behavior. Supported the nativism perspective

eclectic approach

Choosing the most effective therapeutic technique given the present circumstances

Psychiatrists

Clinical psychologists are often contrasted with psychiatrists, who are medical doctors that focus on the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. The difference is in terms of training and approach to treatment. Because psychiatrists are medical doctors and do not have the same type of training as a clinical psychologist, psychiatrists typically focus on pharmacotherapy (i.e., prescribing medications) as the primary means of treating mental illness.

Comparative psychology

Comparative psychology is the study of the behavior of nonhuman animals, and it is often (but not always) interested in making a comparison to human psychology in an effort to discover underlying universals.

Fields of Applied Psychology

Consumer behavior, educational, forensics and legal, human factors, health, industrial and organizational, political, school

Nativism

Contrasting to empiricism, nativism hypothesizes that some forms of knowledge are innate

reflex

Descartes described as the body acting without the mind

René Descartes

Describe Dualism saying the mind is inherently immaterial

Developmental psychology

Developmental psychology studies the way that people develop across the lifespan, including how our thoughts and behaviors change as we age

Dualism

Dualism (also called "mind-body dualism") is the philosophical position that the mind and the body are separate entities. In many ways, people are "intuitive" dualists, believing themselves and others to exist apart from their physical bodies.

Empiricism

Empiricism is the view that knowledge arises directly from what we observe and experience. As such, psychology (as with all scientific disciplines) is inherently observational in nature.

Wilhelm Wundt

Established the first psychological laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Wundt was interested in sensation and perception - how people understand the world and turn it into ideas and thoughts. Mental experience - the mind - was his major area of study. "Father of Modern psychology"

William James

Father of American Psychology. Critic of Structuralism. Professor at Harvard university. While structuralists may be able to break down conscious experience into its basic elements, he argued that studying these pieces without an understanding of their function would provide little to no actual insight into the workings of the mind (1884; 1890).

Structuralism

First School of thought. Wundt and his students treated the mind much like chemists and physicists of their day treated the world itself: They wanted to break it down into fundamental pieces

Levels of Explanation of psychological phenomena

For any psychological phenomenon, there are multiple ways of explaining its cause. A primary way to divide these levels of explanation is in terms of ultimate and proximate explanations

Unconscious Mind

Freud

Gestalt psychology

Functionalism did not supersede structuralism. Gestalt psychology took root in Berlin, focusing on understanding how people perceived a unified whole out of the many chaotic individual elements of sensation; this was in some opposition to traditional structuralism as well.

Rogers and Maslow

Influential humanists

intersectional approach

Kimberlé Crenshaw was the first to propose an intersectional approach to studying issues related to culture and cultural identity, emphasizing that people are not defined by any single aspect of their identities.

Positive psychology

Martin Seligman - Branch of psychology focused not on what can go wrong with human functioning (as is the case with much of clinical psychology) but instead on studying how humans flourish and how positive outcomes can be achieved

Sigmund Freud

Mental illness - Freud believed that these illnesses originated from the unconscious mind - a portion of the mind that is closed off from conscious analysis. Viewed humanity negatively in nature

biological determinism

Nativism taken to the extreme

Behaviorism

Originated from animal research where you are forced to observe behaviors. Watson popularized the notion that the mind and internal mental states were beyond the scope of psychology, rebuking introspection as a meaningful technique and proposing that psychology should focus its efforts solely on the study of observable behavior

Personality psychology

Personality psychology studies individual differences, investigating how and why people act differently based on their enduring characteristics or traits.

phrenology

Popular in the early nineteenth century, phrenology made the case that the shape of the skull was the result of the size of brain structures beneath it. Further, because these different brain areas corresponded to different characteristics or abilities, phrenologists believed that knowing about the shape of a person's skull could tell you about the person's mental capacities as well.

John B Watson

Popularized behaviorism

Steven Pinker

Popularized the cognitive revolution

behavior

Psychologists use behavior - actions, words, response times, or even brain activity - to make inferences about what is happening in the mind

Definition of psychology

The scientific study of both behavior and the mind

Distinction between translational and applied research

Translational research is applied research, but it is necessarily based on an attempt to apply discoveries from basic research to practical problems.

Ultimate explanation

Ultimate explanations attempt to address the reasons why a psychological phenomenon occurs by appealing to its role in the process of evolution. Baby crying because they need something. Hard to find evidence to support claims.

evolutionary psychology

Very hard to determine. Some psychologists today continue to apply the theory of evolution to psychology, searching for ultimate explanations of psychological phenomena. This approach to psychology is known as evolutionary psychology, and it strives to explain how mental processes and behavior have developed over the course of evolutionary history

Counseling Psychologists

Where clinical psychologists tend to diagnose and treat more severe forms of mental illness, counseling psychologists generally focus on helping people deal with ongoing life problems or stressors, or dealing with the transition from one life situation to another.

systematic introspection

Where introspection simply considered experiences of one individual, the process of systematic introspection attempted to standardize the way conscious experiences were reported so that one person's experiences could be compared to another's more effectively.

Difference between structuralism and functionalism

While a structuralist might understand the length of each individual hair and the average spacing from one follicle to the next, a functionalist would argue that those details are meaningless without knowing that the purpose of fur is to keep the body warm. Similarity - both structuralism and functionalism (and most early work in psychology) focused on exploring immediate conscious experience, and they often used similar methods to do so.

Development in understanding of physiology and anatomy

although this work was generally considered to be in the realm of medicine or biology rather than related directly to the mind. One of the first documented efforts to explain psychological disorders as illnesses (rather than possession by spirits, for example) was done in the Muslim world.

Feminist psychology

analyzes the role that gender plays in a person's development and behaviors, appealing to cultural differences in the ways societies raise and treat men and women

Applied practice

applied practiced refers to the actual application of techniques to the problems themselves

Basic Research

basic research in psychology attempt to understand the fundamental principles that govern behavior and mind. Additionally, most basic research in psychology is conducted with perfectly healthy people, and not clinical populations; in fact, much psychology research is done with introductory psychology students such as yourselves. Basic research can often be described as investigating the how and why of behavior, without regard for the ways the information will ultimately be used.

Phycologists Categories

basic research, application, clinical work

Clinical Psychology

clinical psychology is defined by its focus on identifying, preventing, and relieving distress or dysfunction that is psychological in origin. It is another form of applied psychology with a focus on mental health and wellness issues.

Cognitive psychology

cognitive psychology is broadly interested in how people process information and includes areas such as attention, perception, memory, problem-solving, language, and thought

mind

entirely unobservable

Cognitive Influences

explain human behavior given prior context of experience

Translational research

focuses on taking research that was originally basic in nature and applying it to practical problems. the effort is to translate basic findings into practical solutions.

Initial school of thought related to psychology

philosophy

Origins of psychology

philosophy, theology, and anatomy

Proximate explanation

proximate explanations attempt to describe an immediate cause of a psychological phenomenon. Broken into functional reason and biological reasons. Functional (baby hungry) Biologival (tear ducts)

Epigenetic

psychologists generally agree that most psychological phenomena are the result of interactions between nature and nurture and instead argue over the extent to which nature and nurture are responsible. The recent boom in studies related to epigenetics attests to this tension

Culture

shared set of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and customs belonging to a specific group or community of people

Social psychology

social psychology is interested in how an individual's thoughts and actions are influenced by the social environment and the presence of others

Biological influences

we can "peek in" at mental processes as they are happening in the brain using equipment such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), allowing us to view changes in blood flow to different regions of the brain in real time as people think

Origin of the word psychology

"the study of the psyche, or soul" (psyche - "breath, spirit, soul" + logia - "study of")

Cognitive revolution

Renewed interest in the mental process. Technology gives us a new perspective and way to view the mind. Use behavior as a means to make inferences about the processes happening in the mind. As Pinker argues in the video, the computer (and its increased "accessibility" - at least to researchers) was critical in shifting how psychologists thought about making inferences about the mind.

Applied psychology

Solving practical problems is the major focus of applied psychology. Typically, the goal is to change behavior to solve some practical problem, such as resolving mental health issues, improving workplace efficiency, or improving educational outcomes.

Applied research

Subset of applied psychology. Applied research is done to discover a new or more effective way to solve some specific problem

psychoanalysis

System for understanding the unconscious mind and treating the illnesses that stem from it. Psychoanalysis proposes multiple theories about the unconscious mind that touch on a variety of topics in psychology, including personality, development, and of course, causes of mental illness. According to Freud's system of psychoanalysis, the critical component to resolving mental health issues was the process of analyzing the contents of the unconscious mind so that relevant thoughts and feelings could be brought up to the level of consciousness