Psych. Ch. 1
Wilhelm Wundt
"He wanted to do for psychology what the periodic table of the elements did for chemistry," lectures a psychology professor. To whom is the professor MOST likely referring?
stimulus
A _____ refers to a sensory input from the environment.
language has served an adaptive function
According to an evolutionary psychologist, the reason humans developed language was because:
evolutionary psychology
According to the _____ approach, the human brain is more like a computer that is specialized to do a few tasks very well and less like an all-purpose computer that can learn to do anything.
evolutionary
Ade thinks human jealousy and other emotions can be explained on the basis of their adaptive value over time. He is MOST likely a(n):
behavior and mental processes
Akira has declared psychology as his major. He will be studying the science of:
By studying the errors in mental processes, we gain a better understanding of the normal functioning mind.
Although William James and Sigmund Freud employed two very different theoretical approaches to psychology, what was the common thread in their views?
people change and sometimes we don't realize that change (?); he studied the minds of children by their mistakes
In what way was Piaget's work incompatible with behaviorism?
"The broken clay has more."
James gave a 3-year-old child two balls of clay that were the same size, but one of them was then broken into pieces. What might the child say about the clay?
hysteria
Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet were interested in a condition that results in the temporary loss of motor control or cognitive functions that have no obvious physical origin. What were they studying?
let her have her favorite dessert after she has finished cleaning her room; pair cleaning her room with eating her favorite dessert
Jessica will not clean her room. Her father is not sure how to increase Jessica's motivation for cleaning her room. B. F. Skinner would advise Jessica's father to _____, while Ivan Pavlov would advise Jessica's father to _____.
Locke
The philosopher _____ believed that all knowledge is attained through experience.
Max Wertheimer
The psychologist _____ reasoned that the human perception of objective reality is subjective because people often see the whole, rather than the sum of multiple parts.
identify unconscious thoughts and bring them into awareness.
The purpose of Freud's psychoanalytic approach to therapy (called psychoanalysis) is to:
the environment
The stimulus-response method of behaviorism demonstrates the important influence of _____ on human and animal behavior.
soul; to study
The word "psychology" is derived from the Greek words psyche and logos. Which combination of definitions is CORRECT for these words?
consciousness was more of a flowing stream that could not be broken down into parts.
Unlike Wilhelm Wundt, William James believed that:
psychoanalytic
Victor's professor believes that talking about dreams and childhood will bring things from the unconscious to conscious awareness. Victor's professor MOST likely believes in the _____ approach.
industrial/organizational psychologist
Wendy works for a business, and her job is to assess productivity and find ways to improve it. What kind of psychologist is Wendy?
he was the ship memory guy; he concluded behavior is not a function of environment but of a person's subjective construal of what happened, and this idea lead into social psychology
What basic idea underlay Kurt Lewin's work and why did social psychologists reject behaviorism?
behavioral neuro deals with brain/behavior while cognitive deals with mind/brain
What is the difference between behavioral neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience?
structuralism
an approach to psychology that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind's basic elements.
gestalt psychology
an approach to psychology that emphasized the way in which the mind creates perceptual experience.
behaviorism
an approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behavior.
psychoanalysis
a therapy that aims to give people the insight into the contents of their unconscious minds
their analysis of the situation.
According to Kurt Lewin, a person's subsequent behavior is dependent on:
William James
A. disagreed that consciousness could be broken down into separate elements. B. argued that consciousness was like a flowing stream, serving to adapt people to their environments. C. studied mental function.
idealism
Because the Gestalt psychologists believed that perception reflects an interpretation of the world, they reflect a strain of thought known as philosophical:
mental processes, such as memory, perception, thought, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology applies scientific methods to the study of:
psychoanalysis
Bringing unconscious material into conscious awareness is the focus of:
psychology
Cathy is studying chimpanzee decision-making behavior. In which scientific field is she working?
industrial-organizational
Clara is a psychologist who works for a multinational corporation; her job is to assess productivity and find ways to improve it. Clara works in the subfield of _____ psychology.
cognitive processes
Cognitive neuroscientists link brain activity and
natural selection; functionalism
Darwin proposed the principle of _____, which supports the psychological approach of _____.
philosophical empiricism
David tries out a new hobby, but after a week, he gives up because he is not good at it. David's mother tells him that to become good at the hobby, he has to practice. Which philosophy does David's mother seem to hold?
psychoanalytic
Dr. Greene believes that unconscious mental processes are involved in shaping our thoughts and feelings, and they are responsible for motivating most human behavior. Dr. Greene's views are MOST aligned with the _____ approach in psychology.
behaviorist; cognitive psychologist
Dr. Greenway argues that psychology should focus on observable, measurable behavior. Dr. Cech suggests that psychology should study how people think and process information. Dr. Greenway is BEST described as a _____, whereas Dr. Cech is BEST described as a _____.
psychoanalysis
Dr. Josef believes that the goal of therapy is to bring unconscious material into conscious awareness. Dr. Josef practices:
structuralism
Dr. Leleux asserts that psychologists should attempt to identify the fundamental attributes of mental experience. Dr. Leleux appears most sympathetic to psychology's school of: Please choose the correct answer from the following choices, and then select the submit answer button.
philosophical nativism
Elizabeth believes that no matter how hard someone practices, they will never be a professional athlete or expert musician without inborn ability. Elizabeth leans toward a belief in:
reinforcement
Every time Samantha completes a math problem correctly, her mom gives her a piece of candy. This makes her more likely to complete math problems correctly in the future. This is an example of:
nativism
Frances believes that without innate ability, no matter how hard someone practices, he or she will never be a professional athlete or expert musician. Frances believes in philosophical:
evolutionary
Ginger believes that the mind is a collection of specialized modules that developed to do a few things very well. Ginger would MOST likely consider herself a(n) _____ psychologist.
Japanese people are more likely to notice the background because of their holistically interdependent culture while Americans notice what is in the foreground thanks to a largely individualized and independent culture.
Give an example of a way in which culture shapes perception.
He added reward and motivation. Animals learned from their environment how to act to find food.
How did Skinner's contributions differ from Pavlov's?
computers seem to do the same tasks as the mind which is to reason, remember, learn, and think
How did the advent of the computer allow psychologists to talk about the mind?
evolutionary psychology
Maria believes that the almost universal love of men for soccer or football can be traced back to distant human ancestors who passed the trait down because it gave them advantages in natural selection. Which field of psychology is MOST consistent with her view?
verbal language
Noam Chomsky believed behaviorism couldn't work because of how we learn:
language
Noam Chomsky's rebuttal of B. F. Skinner's ideas on _____ helped to bring cognitive psychology to the forefront.
Max Wertheimer
One's favorite motion picture is not really a "movie" at all, but rather a succession of still pictures presented at a specific rate. Movies are therefore an illusion similar to the stimulus studied by:
as a blank slate.
Philosophical empiricists believe a newborn baby is born:
camera picture; painting
Philosophical realists believe perception is like a _____, while philosophical idealists believe perception is more like a _____.
subjective; objective
Psychology through the early 20th century focused on _____ information until the development of behaviorism, which shifted its focus to _____ information.
cognitive neuroscientist
Reiko uses animals to model the behavioral defects that occur when certain parts of the brain are removed. Matthew scans humans as they perform an attentional task to see what areas of the brain they are using. Reiko would be considered a behavioral neuroscientist, while Matthew would be considered a:
John Garcia
Research by _____ showed that rats could learn to associate nausea with food much more quickly than they could learn to associate nausea with a tone or a light.
the mind
Researchers who study people's private inner emotions are studying:
philosophical nativism
Sam's daughter starts to hit other children while at the playground. His daughter has never been exposed to violence, nor has she ever seen someone hit another person. Sam believes that she inherited this tendency from his father, who was a violent person. Sam's explanation of his daughter's behavior fits the theory of:
her unconscious mind
Sara is scared of spiders but does not remember ever having a bad experience with spiders; she only knows that she gets a bad feeling from them. According to psychoanalytic theory, her current fear of spiders is influenced by:
cognitive psychology
Scientists like Jean Piaget and Kurt Lewin paved the way for _____ by renewing interests in mental events such as perception, memory, and judgments.
psychoanalytic
The emphasis on the importance of unconscious mental processes in shaping thoughts, feelings, and behaviors marks the _____ approach in psychology.
there are regions of the brain that produce certain abilities
The examination of patients with brain damage helped psychologists deduce:
behavioral neuroscience
The field of _____ links behavior and activity in the nervous system, especially among nonhuman animals.
Rats: Garcia thought it meant that every organism is evolved to respond to particular stimuli in particular ways—that animals come into the world "biologically prepared" to learn some associations more easily than others. In the real world of forests and sewers, a rat's nausea is usually caused by eating spoiled food, and although Garcia's rats had been born in a laboratory and had never eaten spoiled food, their ancestors had. Millions of years of evolution had designed the rat brain so that it would quickly learn to associate an episode of nausea with the taste of food, and that's why rats learned this association so much more quickly and easily than they learned others.
What kind of evidence suggested that behaviorism was wrong to ignore the organism's evolutionary history?
areas of the brain that are damaged, used the most- maps showing the amount of blood that was flowing in different parts of a person's brain at a particular moment in time. Because neural activity requires oxygen, and because blood supplies it, these scans can tell us which areas of a brain were processing the most information at any particular time
What kinds of things can be learned from brain scans?
interest in mental events and evolution
What two developments led psychologists away from behaviorism?
they both studied how people perceived things. Wertheimer focused on length of time (flashing, stationary lights that appeared to move and blink for a longer time) and Bartlett's study focused on how a person's memory changes over time (they remember what they expected to read not what they actually read).
What was similar about Wertheimer's and Bartlett's findings?
He thought psychology should focus on what people could do rather than what they felt or thought in order to become a "real science."
What was the key idea behind Watson's behaviorism?
Children learn to form sentences using grammar which could not ever be behaviorism. They learn this without even hearing them.
What was wrong with Skinner's explanation of how children learn language?
realism
When Belle is looking at a painting in her local art museum, light is bouncing off the canvas and hitting her eye, and her brain uses only that information to produce her perception of that painting, according to the view of philosophical:
recalling their memories
When a computer retrieves information that is already stored on a hard drive, it is like a human:
Most psychologists support the use of idealism, since it views perception as an inference about the world.
Which statement about the debate between realism and idealism is TRUE?
Freud's theories had little impact on experimental psychologists (like William James). On the other hand, clinicians payed a lot of attention, and his ideas also influenced philosophy, literature, and art.
Why did Freud have so little influence on experimental psychology? Where did he have influence?
functionalism; structuralism
William James suggested that consciousness is adaptive, and we should try to understand the purpose of the mental processes involved. Wundt suggested that we should break consciousness down into specific elements. James's theory was called _____, and Wundt's theory was called _____.
natural selection
William James's functional approach to psychology was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of:
Max Wertheimer.
Your ability to see a continuous picture when watching a movie is actually the result of seeing several lights flashed one after another on a screen. This creates the appearance of motion from still pictures. This experience demonstrates the theories of:
William Wundt
_____ believed that consciousness had different parts, while William James believed that consciousness was more of a flowing stream that could not be broken down into parts.
Thomas Hobbes
_____ believed that the mind and body are not really different things, and attempted to explain how all mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena.
Kant; nativism
_____ created the view of philosophical _____ to explain that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired.
Hobbes; materialism
_____ created the view of philosophical _____ to explain that the mind is what the brain does.
Noam Chomsky's
_____ critique of behaviorism brought about its decline by using formal mathematical logic.
cognitive psychology
_____ is the scientific study of mental processes, including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning.
Sir Frederic Bartlett
_____ studied memory and realized that people's recall of past information was not a simple recording.
hysteria
a loss of function that has no obvious physical origin
Principle of reinforcement
a principle stating that any behavior that is rewarded will be repeated and any behavior that isn't won't.
Functionalism
a school of thought that focuses on how mental abilities allow people to adapt to their environment.
psychoanalytic theory
emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on feelings, thoughts, and behaviors
philosophical empiricism
states that all knowledge is acquired through experience.
psychology
the scientific study of mind and behavior
cultural psychology
the study of how culture influences mental life
cognitive processing
the study of human information-processing
social psychology
the study of the causes and consequences of sociality
behavioral neuroscience
the study of the relationship between the brain and behavior (especially in non-human animals).
cognitive neuroscience
the study of the relationship between the brain and the mind (especially in humans)
developmental psychology
the study of the ways in which psychological phenomena change over the life span.
evolutionary psychology
the study of the ways in which the human mind has been shaped by natural selection.
philosophical empiricism
the view that all knowledge is acquired through experience
philosophical materialism
the view that all mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena. Most modern psychologists are this.
philosophical dualism
the view that mind and body are fundamentally different things
philosophical nativism
the view that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired. Most modern psychologists are this.
natural selection
theory that features become more or less predominate in a population based on reproduction and survival rates of an organism.