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