Matakuliah : L0014/Psikologi Umum
Tahun
: 2007
WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY ?
Pertemuan 1 s.d 2
DEFINITION & GOALS OF PSYCHOLOGY
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ARISTOTLE
Psyche + Science = Psychology
• Psyche = essence of life  translate from Greek = mind  breath
• He believed that the psyche escape in the last dying breath that was
exhaled
• He believed that one must observe the thing being studied – look at
it, listen to it, touch it
 Aristotle vs Plato (understand = only Thinking about it)
• Logos (Greek) = the study of
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DEFINITION
• Psychology is the “study of life”
• Psychology is the science of behavior and mental processes
• Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and the mind
– The behavior = actions and responses that we can directly observe
– Mind = Internal states and processes – thoughts and feelings – can not be
seen directly and must be inferred from observable, measurable responses
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GOALS OF PSYCHOLOGY
1. TO DESCRIBE how people and other species behave
2. TO PREDICT how people and other species will behave under
certain conditions
3. TO UNDERSTAND the causes of these behaviors
4. TO INFLUENCE behavior through the control of its causes
5. TO APPLY psychological knowledge in ways that enhance human
welfare
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Psychology & other science
Biology
Scientific study
of life processes
and biological
structures
Medicine
Anthropology
Scientific study
Scientific study of
of health and the
cultural origins,
causes and
evolution and
treatment of
Psychology
variations
diseases
Scientific study of behavior
and mental processes
Computer Science
Scientific study of
information
processing and
manipulations
of data
Sociology
Scientific study of
human social
relations and
systems
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VIEWPOINTS IN PSYCHOLOGY
AND THEIR ORIGINS
• Nature of Conscious Experience
• Functions of the Conscious Mind
• Psychometrics
• Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory
• Neuroscience Perspective
• Nature of the “Unconscious Mind”
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• Aristotle – 2.200 years after he lived : Psychology as part of
Philosophy
• 17th – 18th : all the sciences start to distinct the subject matter and
scientific methods
• 1875, William James : Laboratory at Harvard University, thought the
1st psychology course and in 1890 published an influential early
textbook of psychology
• 1879, Wilhelm Wundt : 1st Psychology Laboratory in Leipzig, Germany
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Nature of Conscious Experience
What are you thinking and feeling right now ?
To understand the basic elements of consciousness and how they worked together to create the experience of being alive
• Wunt, Titchener and Structuralism
– Wanted to identify the basic elements of conscious experience and how those
elements are organized
– Methods : Introspection  a method of looking inward at one’s own conscious
experience
– Structuralism = the structure of mind through controlled introspection
• J. Henry Alston
– The studies of the sensations of heat and cold - nerve stimulation
– Wrote 1st research article published by an African American Psychologist in a journal of
the APA
• Max Wertheimer and Gestalt psychology
– Gestalt = whole
– Human consciousness could not be meaningfully broken down into raw elements
– Phi Phenomenon = The whole is different from the sum of its parts
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Functions of the Conscious Minds
To understand the value of consciousness to us as species
• William James and Functionalism
– Based on Charles Darwin Theory
– Thinking, feeling, learning, remembering and other processes of human consciousness
existed only because they helped us survive as a species and adapt to the demands of
life
– Learn about conscious awareness, voluntary action (free will), habits and emotions
• Hemann Ebbinghaus & Mary Whiton Calkins and Studies of Memory
– Ebbinghaus : Invented a new set of meaningless items “Nonsense Syllables”
– Mary : “paired associates” method
• Cognitive Psychology
– All intellectual processes - perceiving, believing, thinking, remembering, knowing,
deciding, etc.
– Influenced by Gestalt psychology and Structuralism
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Psychometrics
the measurement (metrics) of mental functions (psycho)
• Albert Binet
– Help the Paris Ministry of Education (1890) to choosing the children to be
given advanced academic training and make the decision when the children
were still young
– Develop a way to measure Intelligence
– Find a set of questions (e.g. arithmetic problems, word definitions, memory
tasks) based on age norm
– Stanford - Binet Intelligence scale
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Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory
To study psychological processes that useful in the struggle to survive,
emphasis in the importance of learning from experience
• 1890, Ivan Pavlov
– Identified a simple form of learning – conditioning (inherited reflex) comes to
be triggered by a stimulus that has nothing to do with the reflex
• 1910 - 1920, John B. Watson & Margaret Floy Washburn
– Behaviorism
– It was impossible to study private mental processes because only outward
behavior could be measured and scientifically understood
• Albert Bandura & Social Learning Theory
– Our behavior are learned from other persons in society
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Neuroscience Perspective
• 1852, Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
– Description of Neurons - the cells that make up brain and nervous system
• Interested in the structures of the brain that play roles in emotion,
reasoning, speaking and other psychological processes
• Determine the extent to which our psychological characteristic (e.g.
intelligence & emotional stability), are influenced by heredity
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Nature of the “Unconscious Mind”
The most important aspect of human psychology is the mental processes that we are unaware
• Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis
– The roots of the psychological problems were innate motives, particularly sexual and
aggressive that reside in unconscious part of the mind
• Humanistic Psychology and Unconscious Mind
– Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Victor Frankl
– Human beings determine their own fates through conscious decision they make
– The most important aspect of people is our view of what we are like - our SELF
CONCEPT
– Because of the society, sometimes we push upsetting information about ourselves
into the unconscious, cause 2 problems
• Most of us have an inaccurate self concept, because we push out of consciousness
information about ourselves that doesn’t match what society values
• The negative unconscious information sometimes threatens our self concepts and make us
anxious
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CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES IN PSYCHOLOGY
• The Sociocultural Perspectives
• Evolutionary Psychology
• The Positive Psychology Movements
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Human Diversity : The Sociocultural Perspective
• The principles of perception, motivation, learning and personality apply for all
human beings
• What makes psychologically different ?
• Ethnic Group vs Ethnic Identity
• Gender Identity
Social anthropology, Social Learning Theories
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Evolutionary Psychology
• The basic idea : the behavior of animals – including human animals –
can be understood in term of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution
• Darwin hypothesized that the variations occur occasionally in the
process of reproduction, known to be based on spontaneous change
in a gene, known as mutations
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Positive Psychology Movement
• Stop focusing only in human problems
• What is best about human lives
Martin Seligman, 1990, one of APA presidents
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SPECIALITY AREAS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
• Applied psychologists used knowledge acquired by psychologist in
the basic areas and by their own research studies, to solve and
prevent significant human problems
• Areas : Clinical psychology, Counseling psychology, Educational and
School Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Health
Psychology
• Psychology vs Psychiatry
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What we know about human behavior ?
1. Human beings are biological creature
2. Every person is different, yet much the same
3. People can understood fully only in the context of their culture,
ethnic identity and gender identity
4. Human lives are continuous process of change
5. Behavior is motivated
6. Humans are social animals
7. People play an active part in creating their experiences
8. Behavior can be adaptive or maladaptive
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