A. Beckingham
Psych12
Chatelech Secondary School
Review: Psychology
A. DEFINITION
1. Psychology: The scientific study of mental processes and behavior
B. TWO MAJOR DIVISIONS
1. Applied psychology
a. Mental testing
i. Applications?
b. Mental health care
i. Applications?
c. Education
i. Applications?
d. Work
i. Applications?
e. Military and intelligence
i. Applications?
f. Health, well-being, and social change
2. Research psychology (an academic discipline)
a. Controlled experiments
i. Psychologist is interfering somehow with the participants in order to
study the results
 Examples?
b. Neurological studies
i. Using EEGs – electroencephalography
c. Animal studies
i. Psychologists are interested in patterns of behavious and not just in
humans!
d. Qualitative and descriptive research
i. Observation, interviews, participant observation (researcher as
participant)
ii. Jane Goodall living with chimpanzees
iii. “Qualitative research is descriptive research that is focused on
observing and describing events as they occur, with the goal of
capturing all of the richness of everyday behavior and with the hope
of discovering and understanding phenomena that might have been
missed if only more cursory examinations have been made.” –
Wikipedia
C. FOUR MAJOR THEMES
1. Personality
a. What makes personality?
A. Beckingham
Psych12
Chatelech Secondary School
i.
Poster activity in groups
 Design and graphic and some words that describe how your
group perceptualizes personality and what are the key factors
to someone’s personality
 Venn diagram, bubble graph, comic, etc.
b. Definition:
i. Personality: enduring patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion
ii. Personality: the pattern of thoughts, feelings, social adjustments, and
behaviors consistently exhibited over time that strongly influences
one's expectations, self-perceptions, values, and attitudes
iii. Personality Trait: enduring personal characteristics that are revealed
in a particular pattern of behaviour in a variety of situations.
 Three assumptions
 Relatively stable over time; differ amoungst
individuals; influence behaviour
c. Five Factor Model – Lewis Goldberg (one of many trait theory models)
i. Openness to experience
ii. Conscientiousness
iii. Extroversion
iv.
Agreeableness
v.
Neuroticism (emotionality)
d. Trait models have been criticized as being purely descriptive and offering
little explanation of the underlying causes of personality
e. Type theory – Jung Typology
f. Personality:
i. predicts human reactions to other people, problems, and stress
ii. Personality not stable until 30, then fixed; personality constructs of
children are referred to as temperament
iii. originates from the Latin persona, which means mask.
g. Tests
i. Projective: assume personality is primarily unconscious; respons to
ambiguous stimuli; e.g., the Roschach Test (ink blot)
ii. Objective: assume personality is consciously accessible; issues: false
reporting
2. Unconscious mind
a. A part of the psyche outside the awareness of the individual which
nevertheless influences thoughts and behavior
i. E.g. Freudian slip
ii. E.g. cognitive psychology discusses the “filter” model of attention;
information processing below the threshold of consciousness
A. Beckingham
Psych12
Chatelech Secondary School
iii. E.g. division between explicit and implicit memory
b. A hallmark of early psychological study
c. Application: An example of this was done by Bargh et al. in 1996. Subjects
were implicitly primed with words related to the stereotype of elderly
people (example: Florida, forgetful, wrinkle). While the words did not
explicitly mention speed or slowness, those who were primed with these
words walked more slowly upon exiting the testing booth than those who
were primed with neutral stimuli.
3. Motivation
a. Intention; similar to the concept of will; also instinct
b. Drive theory: the forcesof instinct combine into a single source of energy
which exerts a constant influence.
c. Can be modulated (controlled; vary the strength) and manipulated in
different ways
i. Such as?
4. Development
a. Focusing (mainly) on the development of the human mind through the
lifespan
b. May focus on cognitive, affective, moral, social, or neural development
c. Concerned with times of rapid change
i. Such as? (adolescence and old age)
D. MAJOR SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
1. Biological (physiological; neuropsychological)
a. The study of the biological substrates of behavior and mental processes
b. Key areas of study: comparative psychology – comparison to animals;
perception – where physical mechanisms meet mental processing
2. Behavioural
a. Human behavior is the main area of study
b. Often begins with tests on mammals
i. Why?
c. Key areas
i. Classical conditioning
 Stimulus-response
 Little albert
 dog salivation – Pavlov
ii. Operant conditioning
 Reinforcement/punishment to perform an action
 Skinner box – shock vs food
 Slot machines
A. Beckingham
Psych12
Chatelech Secondary School
3. Cognitive
a. Studies cognition – the mental process underlying mental activity.
b. key areas:
i. perception, attention, reasoning, thinking, problem solving, memory,
learning, language, and emotion
c. interdisciplinary (cognitive science)
i. involving people such as: cognitive psychologists, cognitive
neuroscientists, researchers in AI, linguists, human-computer
interaction, logicians, and social scientists.
d. Interesting topic of study: cognitive bias, or irrational thought
i. Examples
 Availability heuristic – the tendency to overestimate the
likelihood of events with greater “availability” in memory,
which can be influenced by how recent the memories are or
how unusual or emotionally charged they may be
 Backfire effect – when people react to disconfirming evidence
by strengthening their beliefs
 Why slander is so powerful
4. Social
5. Psychoanalysis
6. Existential-humanistic theories