Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology Yesterday and Today
I.
Psychological Science: Getting to Know You
A. What is Psychology?
1. Psychology is the science of mental processes and behavior.
a. Mental processes are what the brain does when a person stores, recalls, or uses
information, or has specific feelings.
b. Behavior refers to the outwardly observable acts of a person or animal.
2. The goals of psychology are to describe, explain, predict, and control mental
processes and behavior.
B. Levels of Analysis: The Complete Psychology. Psychologists study people at three levels:
1. The level of the brain: focusing on events that involve the structure and
properties of the brain itself -- brain cells and their connections, the chemical soup in
which they live, and the genes
2. The level of the person: focusing on events that involve the nature of beliefs,
desires, and feelings -- the content of the mind, not just its internal mechanics
3. The level of the group: focusing on events that involve relationships
between people, relationships among groups, and culture
II. Psychology Then and Now
A. The Evolution of a Science
1. In one way or another, psychology has always been with us.
2. Psychology’s roots lie in philosophy and physiology.
3. Wilhelm Wundt is usually considered the founder of scientific psychology
a. Wundt set up the first psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879.
b. Wundt and his colleagues founded the school of thought known as
structuralism, which sought to identify the “building blocks” (or structures) of
thought.
c. Their primary investigative tool was introspection, the process of “looking
within,” which led to observations that could not be tested or verified, eventually
dooming this technique.
4. Functionalism sought to understand the ways that the mind helps individuals to
function, or adapt to the world.
a. Functionalists were strongly influenced by Charles Darwin, in that they looked at
the ways in which consciousness helps an individual survive an adapt to an
environment.
b. William James was a leading proponent of functionalism and set up the first
psychology lab in the United States at Harvard University.
c. Functionalists were the first to relate human psychology to animal psychology,
implying that the observation of animals could provide clues to human behavior.
d. Functionalists focused on issues of society, such as improved methods of
education, spawning research that continues today.
5. Gestalt psychology emphasized overall patterns of thought and experience,
emphasizing that the “whole is more than the sum of its parts.”
a. Developed in Germany under the leadership of scientists such as Max
Wertheimer
b. Gestaltists argue that the content of our thoughts comes from what we
perceive, and from inborn tendencies to perceive things in certain ways.
c. Gestaltists addressed how the brain works, and developed over 100 perceptual
laws or principles.
6. Psychodynamic theory was developed by Sigmund Freud to explain how thoughts and
feelings affect our actions.
a. This approach addresses psychology mostly at the level of the person, not the
brain.
b. Freud stressed that many (if not most) mental processes are unconscious, and often
involve sexual and aggressive instincts and urges.
c. Freud believed that normal and abnormal behaviors resulted from an interaction of
conscious and unconscious forces.
d. Since Freud’s techniques center on subjective interpretations of what people say and
do, it is impossible to objectively verify his theories.
e. Psychodynamic theories have led to many new approaches to treating
psychological problems
7. Behaviorism argues that psychology should focus on directly observable behavior.
a. Behaviorism’s leading proponents were Thorndike, Hull, Watson, and Skinner.
b. Skinner and his followers have argued that there is no such thing as mental processes.
c. Behaviorism focuses on how a specific stimulus evokes a specific response.
Responses produce consequences which affect how the organism responds the
next time it encounters the same stimulus.
d. A key idea in behaviorism is reinforcement, and the fact that the consequences of a
behavior affect whether it will be repeated in the future.
e. While behaviorists have identified many conditions in which specific stimuli lead to
specific responses, their objections to the study of mental processes have been refuted
by subsequent research.
8. Humanistic psychology, partly a reaction to psychodynamic and behavioral theories,
argues that people have positive values, free will, and deep inner creativity, the
combination of which leads them to choose life-fulfilling paths to personal growth.
a. Developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
b. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are two key proponents of humanistic
psychology who developed therapies based on humanistic theories.
c. Maslow argued that people have an urge to self-actualize, to develop their fullest
potentials.
d. While not a major force in psychology today, many of today’s therapies are heavily
influenced by humanistic thinking.
9. Cognitive psychology uses an information processing model, similar to those used in
computer programming, to understand how humans store and internally operate on
information.
a. Began in the 1950s and reached its full development in the 1970s
b. Cognitive theories have led to the recent development of cognitive
neuroscience, a blending of cognitive psychology and neuroscience that aims
to specify how the brain stores and processes information.
10. One of the most recent developments in psychology is evolutionary psychology,
which assumes that certain cognitive strategies and goals are so important that natural
selection has built them into our brains.
a. Key proponents of this approach include Lisa Cosmides and John Tooby, David
Buss, and Steven Pinker.
b. The best evidence supporting this theory is cultural universality, where the same
practice occurs in all cultures.
c. This approach does not explain why we have inherited certain characteristics.
d. This approach is difficult to test because we have no direct evidence of what our
ancestors were like and how they evolved.
B. The Psychological Way: What Today’s Psychologists Do. There are three major types
1. Those who help people deal with personal problems or stress:
a. Clinical psychologist: a psychologist who provides psychotherapy and is
trained to administer and interpret psychological tests
b. Counseling psychologist: a psychologist who is trained to help people with
issues that naturally arise during the course of life
c. Clinical neuropsychologist: a clinical psychologist who works specifically with tests
designed to diagnose the effects of brain damage on thoughts, feelings, and behavior,
and to indicate which parts of the brain are impaired following trauma
d. Other helping professionals include psychiatrists, social workers, and
psychiatric nurses.
2. Those who study mental processes and behavior scientifically, such as Academic
psychologists, who focus on research and teaching. They include:
a. Developmental psychology: the study of how people grow and change with age and
experience.
b. Cognitive Psychology: the study of how thinking and memory operate and
affect people.
c. Social psychology: the study of how people interact with other people and
how they behave in groups.
d. Personality Psychology: the study of individual differences in preferences
and inclinations.
3. Applied psychologists seek to solve specific problems, study how to improve
products and procedures and conducts research to help solve specific practical
problems. They include:
a. Industrial/organizational psychologists: apply psychology to workplace
problems and situations.
b. Sport psychologists: work with athletes to improve their performances.
c. Educational or school psychologists work with educators and families,
devising ways to improve the development of children at school.
d. People trained in academic psychology can also work in applied situations
to solve specific problems related to their field.
III. The Science of Psychology: Designed to Be Valid
A. The Scientific Method involves the following steps:
1. Specifying a problem
2. Systematically observing events, and collecting data in a manner that can be
replicated
3. Forming a hypothesis of the relationship between variables
4. Collecting new observations to test the hypothesis
5. Using such evidence to formulate and support a theory
6. Testing the theory: a good theory is falsifiable. It makes predictions that it cannot
“squirm out of.”
B. The Psychologist’s Toolbox: Techniques of Scientific Research
1. Much psychological research relies on conducting experiments.
a. Independent variables are the aspects of the experimental situation that are
intentionally varied by the researcher.
b. Dependent variables are the aspects of the experimental situation that are
measured as an independent variable is changed.
c. The experimental effect is the difference in the dependent variable that is due to
changes in the independent variable.
d. Confounding variables are independent variables that vary along with the one of
interest and could affect what is measured.
e. A control group is treated exactly the same way as the experimental group, except
for the one aspect of the situation under study. It is used to sort out the effects of
confounding variables.
f.
A control condition is like a control group, but administered to the same
participants who receive the experimental condition.
2. Sometimes, psychologists must use quasi-experimental designs when they cannot
achieve the random assignment of subjects required by true experimental designs.
3. Correlational research examines how closely interrelated two measured
variables are.
a. A positive correlation means that the values of one variable increase as the values of
another variable increase.
b. A negative correlation means that the values of one variable increase as the values of
another variable decrease.
c. Correlations do not prove that cause-and-effect relationships exist between
variables.
4. Naturalistic observation involves collecting data through careful observation of realworld settings. This approach does not provide explanations and does not allow for
controlling confounding variables.
5. Case studies examine a single instance of a situation in great detail. While
experimentation can be done with case studies, it is often difficult or invalid to generalize
from a single case to an entire population.
6. Surveys search for information through a set of questions, typically about beliefs,
attitudes, preferences, or activities. Survey data must be examined cautiously because of
problems such as the wording of the questions, and people do not always answer survey
questions honestly.
7. A meta-analysis combines the results from different studies to discover patterns in data.
a. A sample is a group from which a researcher obtains measures or observations.
b. A population is the entire set of relevant people or animals.
C. Be a Critical Consumer of Psychology.
1. Reliability is the measure of consistency of research.
2. Validity is when something provides a true measure of what it is meant to measure.
3. Bias occurs when previous beliefs, expectations, or habits alter the participants’
responses or affect the design or conduct of a study.
a. Response bias is a tendency to respond in a particular way regardless of
knowledge or beliefs relevant to performing the task.
b. Sampling bias occurs when the participants or items are not chosen at random, so
that an attribute is over- or underrepresented.
4. Experimenter expectancy effects occur when an investigator’s expectations lead him or
her (consciously or unconsciously) to treat participants in a way that induces the expected
result. A double-blind design is used eliminate expectancy effects.
5. Pseudopsychology involves theories or statements that look like psychology but are in
fact superstition or unsupported opinion pretending to be science.
IV. Ethics: Doing It Right
A. Ethics in Research
1. Abuses by the Nazis led to the first ethical rules (principles) outlawing certain types of
experiments on human beings.
2. Informed consent is the requirement that a potential participant in a study be told
what he or she will be asked to do and possible risks and benefits of the study before
agreeing to take part.
3. Debriefing involves an interview after a study to ensure that the participant has no
negative reactions as a result of participation and understands why a study was
conducted.
4. Most institutional review boards (IRBs) insist on informed consent and debriefing
before authorizing funding for research involving human subjects.
5. Animal studies must also have the approval of IRBs. Researchers are not allowed to
cause animals pain unless that is specifically what is being studied, and must justify the
potential benefits of the research to humans.
B. Ethics in Clinical Practice.
1. Psychologist must follow a code of conduct and are bound by their states’ laws of
confidentiality.
2. Therapists cannot engage in sexual relations with a patient or mistreat a patient
physically or emotionally.