Psychology Chapter 1: What is Psychology

Feminist Psychology

A psychological approach that analyzes the influence of social inequalities on gender relations and on the behavior of the two sexes. As women started entering psychology in 1970's they documented evidence of pervasive bias in the research methods. They critically examined the male bias in psychotherapy. Feminist psychology greatly advances efforts to make psychology the study of all human beings, of all cultures and ethnicities.

Psychometric Psychologist

design and evaluate tests of mental abilities, aptitudes, interests, and personality. We have all taken one or more of these tests in schools, work etc. (major nonclinical specialty)

Clinical Psychologist

diagnose, treat, and study mental or emotional problems. Clinical psychologists are trained to do psychotherapy with severely disturbed people (as well as both ends of the spectrum). (Type of Psychological Practitioner)

Psychobabble

promises easy fixes to life's challenges. It gives people a sense of control and predictability in a confusing world. Pseudoscience also confirms out existing believes and prejudices, whereas scientific psychology often challenges them.

Psychology

the discipline concerned with behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism's physical state, mental state, and external environment

Basic Psychology

the study of psychological issues for the sake of knowledge rather than for its practical application.

Applied Psychology

the study of psychological issues that have direct practical significance; also, the application of psychological findings.

Evolutionary Psychology

- a field of psychology emphasizing evolutionary mechanisms that may help explain human commonalities in cognition, development, emotion, and social practices, and other areas of behavior.

Phrenology

- the now discredited theory that different brain areas account for specific character and personality traits, which can be "read" from bumps on the skull (Greek for "study of the mind")

William James

One of functionalism's leaders. An American philosopher, physician, and psychologist who argued that searching for building blocks of experience, as Wundt and Titchener tried to do, was a waste of time because the brain and mind are constantly changing. Attempting to grasp the nature of the mind through introspection, James wrote " is like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks". He also came up with what he called 'stream of consciousness"

Wilhelm Wundt

The official founder of scientific psychology. He formally established the first psychological laboratory in 1879, in Leipzig, Germany. His work led to structuralism, the first of many approaches to the field. He is called father because if you look at family tree he trained many successful students. He was originally trained in medicine and philosophy. Psychologists especially revere him because he was the first person to announce that he intended to make psychology a science and because his laboratory was the first to have results published in a scholarly journal. One of his favorite research methods was called trained introspection.

Psychological Practice

The professional activities of psychologists generally fall into three broad categories: (1) teaching and doing research in colleges and universities. (2) providing health or mental health services, often referred to as psychological practice. (3) conducting research or applying its findings in nonacademic settings such as business, sports, government, law, and the military.

Biological Perspective

a psychological approach that emphasized bodily events and changes associated with actions, feelings, and thoughts.

Learning Perspective

a psychological approach that emphasizes how the environment and experience affect a person's or animal's actions; it includes behaviorism and social- cognitive learning theories.

Cognitive Perspective

a psychological approach that emphasizes mental process in perception, memory, language, problem solving, and other areas of behavior. It emphasizes what does on in peoples heads, how people reason, remember, understand language, solve problems, acquire moral standards, and form believes. One of its most important contributions has been to show how people's thoughts and explanations affect their actions, feelings and choices. Using clever methods to infer mental process from observable behavior, cognitive researchers have been able to study phenomena that were once only the stuff of speculation.

Sociocultural Perspective

a psychological approach that emphasizes social and cultural influences on behavior. The sociocultural perspective focuses on social and cultural forces outside the individual, forces that shape every aspect of behavior, from how we kiss to how we eat. (social context and cultural rules). Making psychology a more representative and rigorous discipline.

Psychoanalysis

a theory of personality and a method of psychotherapy, originally formulated by Sigmund Freud, that emphasizes unconscious motives and conflicts.

Structuralism

an early psychological approach that emphasized the analysis of immediate experience into basic elements. Popularized by E.B Titchener. Like Wundt, structuralists hoped to analyze sensations, images, and feelings into basic elements. Reliance on introspection got them into trouble. Ask what happens when an organism does something

Functionalism

an early psychological approach that emphasized the function or purpose of behavior and consciousness. Ask how and why an organism does something. They wanted to know how specific behaviors and mental processes help a person or animal adapt to the environment, so they looked for underlying causes and practical consequences of these behaviors and processes. Broadened the field of psychology to include study of children, animals, religious experiences. Functionalist's emphasis on the causes and consequences of behavior was to set the course of psychological science.

Social- Cognitive learning Theorists

combine elements of behaviorism with research on thoughts, values, expectations, and intentions. They believe that people learn not only by adapting their behavior to the environment, but also by observing and imitating others and by thinking about the events happening around them.

Experimental Psychologist

conduct laboratory studies of learning, motivation, emotion, sensation and perception, physiology and cognition. They are not the only ones who do experiments. (major nonclinical specialty)

Behaviorists

focus on the environmental rewards and punishers that maintain or discourage specific behaviors. Behaviorists do not invoke the mind or mental states to explain behavior. They prefer to stick to what they can observe directly: acts and events taking place in the environment. For example: do you have trouble sticking to a schedule? A behaviorist would identify the environmental distractions that could help account for this common problem.

Counseling Psychologist

generally help people deal with problems of everyday life (test anxiety, family conflicts etc). (Type of Psychological Practitioner)

Charles Darwin

inspired functionalists. British naturalist. Darwin argues that a biologist's job is not merely to describe an animal but also to figure out how these attributes enhance survival.

Psychiatrist

is a medical doctor (MD) who has done a three year residency in psychiatry to learn how to diagnose and treat mental disorders.

Psychoanalyst

is a person who practices one particular form of therapy. To call yourself a psychoanalyst, you must have specialized training and undergo extensive psychoanalyst yourself.

Occam's razor

once several explanations of a phenomenon have been generated, a critical thinker chooses the one that accounts for the most evidence while making the fewest unverified assumptions.

Trained introspection

one of Wundt's favorite research methods. Training volunteers to carefully observe, analyze, and describe their own sensations, mental images and emotional reactions. The goal was to break down behavior into its most basic elements.

Empirical

relying on or derived from observation, experimentation or measurement

Psychotherapist

simply anyone who does any kind of psychotherapy. The term is not legally regulated; in fact, in most states, anyone can say that he or she is a "therapist".

Industrial/ Organizational Psychologist

study behavior in the workplace. They are concerned with group decision making, employee moral, work motivation, productivity, job stress, personnel selection, marketing strategies, equipment design, and many other issues. (major nonclinical specialty)

Developmental Psychologist

study how people change and grow over time physically, mentally and socially. Some specialize in childhood issues; others study adolescence, young adulthood, the middle years, or old age. (major nonclinical specialty)

Educational Psychologist

study psychological principles that explain learning and search for ways to improve educational systems. Their interest range from the application of findings on memory and thinking to the use of rewards to encourage achievement. (major nonclinical specialty)

Critical thinking

the ability and willingness to asses claims and make judgments on the basis of well supported reasons and evidence rather an emotion or anecdote

Sigmund Freud

while researchers were working in their labs, struggling to establish psychology as a science, Sigmund Freud was in his office, listening to his patients' reports of depression, nervousness and obsessive habits. He concluded that their distress was due to conflicts and emotional traumas that had occurred in early childhood and that were too threatening to be remembered consciously, such as forbidden sexual feelings for a parent. Freud argued that conscious awareness is merely the top of a mental iceberg. Beneath the visible tip lies the unconscious part of the mind, containing unrevealed wishes, passions, guilty secrets, unspeakable yearnings, and conflicts between desire and duty. Many of these thoughts are sexual or aggressive in nature. They make themselves known in dreams, slips of tongue, apparent accidents, and even jokes. Frued- "no mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore"

Psychological Practitioner

whose goal is to understand and improve people's physical and mental heath work in mental hospitals, clinics, schools counseling centers, and private practices. Since 1970's the number of these have steadily increased. (now account for over 2/3rds)

Cultural Psychologists

within Sociocultural Perspective examine how cultural rules and values both explicit and unspoken affect peoples development, behavior and feelings.

Social Psychologists

within Sociocultural Perspective- social psychologists focus on social rules and roles, how groups affect attitudes and behaviors, who people obey authority, and how each of us is affected by other people.

School Psychologist

work with parents, teachers, students etc. (Type of Psychological Practitioner)