Invitation To Psychology
Carol Wade and Carol Tavris
PowerPoint Presentation by
H. Lynn Bradman
Metropolitan Community College-Omaha
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What is Psychology?
Chapter 1
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What is Psychology?
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The Science of Psychology
What Psychologists Do
Critical and Scientific Thinking in Psychology
Descriptive Studies: Establishing the Facts
Correlational Studies: Looking for Relationships
The Experiment: Hunting for Causes
Evaluating the Findings
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The Science of Psychology
• Psychology, Pseudoscience, and
Common Sense
• The Birth of Modern Psychology
• Psychology's Present
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Defining Psychology
• Psychology is the discipline concerned
with behavior and mental processes and
how they are affected by an organism's
physical state, mental state, and
external environment
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Empirical Evidence
• Evidence gathered by careful
observation, experimentation, and
measurement.
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Psychology, Pseudoscience, and
Common Sense
• Scientific Psychology bears little
relationship to "Pop" Psychology
• Fortune telling, numerology, graphology,
and astronomy are not part of
psychology
• Psychology is not just a fancy name for
common sense
• Psychological research often produces
findings that contradict popular beliefs
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Bumpy Logic
• Phrenology was a
19th-century
pseudoscience
– No scientific
basis
• Phrenology linked
bumps on the
skull with
character traits
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The Birth of Modern
Psychology
• Functionalism: An early psychological
approach that emphasized the function
or purpose of behavior and
consciousness
• Psychoanalysis: A theory of personality
and a method of psychotherapy,
originally formulated by Sigmund Freud,
which emphasizes unconscious motives
and conflicts
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Psychology's Present
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Biological Perspective
Learning Perspective
Cognitive Perspective
Sociocultural Perspective
Psychodynamic Perspective
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Biological Perspective
• A psychological approach that
emphasizes bodily events and changes
associated with actions, feelings, and
thoughts
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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
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Cognitive Perspective
• A psychological approach that
emphasizes mental processes in
perception, memory, language, problem
solving, and other areas of behavior
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Sociocultural Perspective
• A psychological approach that
emphasizes social and cultural influences
on behavior
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Psychodynamic Perspective
• A psychological approach that
emphasizes unconscious dynamics within
the individual, such as inner forces,
conflicts, or the movement of instinctual
energy
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What Psychologists Do
• Psychological Research
• Psychological Practice
• Psychology in the Community
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Psychological Research
• Basic Psychology: The study of
psychological issues in order to seek
knowledge for its own sake rather than
for its practical application
• Applied Psychology: The study of
psychological issues that have direct
practical significance; also the
application of psychological findings.
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Psychological Practice
Psychotherapist
Person who does psychotherapy;
credentials and training vary
Clinical
Psychologist
Psychoanalyst
Has a doctoral degree: Ph.D., Ed.D., or
Psy.D.
Psychiatrist
A physician (M.D.) with specialization in
psychiatry
Other
professionals
Licensing requirements vary by state;
generally at least an M.A. Can be social
worker (LCSW), counselor (MFCC), or
other.
Has specific training in psychoanalysis after
an advanced degree (usually M.D. or
Ph.D.)
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Critical and Scientific Thinking in
Psychology
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Critical Thinking
• Critical Thinking: The ability and
willingness to assess claims and make
objective judgments on the basis of wellsupported reasons and evidence, rather
than emotion or anecdote
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Critical Thinking Guidelines
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Ask Questions: Be willing to wonder
Define Your Terms
Examine the Evidence
Analyze Assumptions and Biases
Avoid Emotional Reasoning
Don't Oversimplify
Consider Other Interpretations
Tolerate Uncertainty
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Hypothesis
• A statement that attempts to predict or
to account for a set of phenomena;
scientific hypotheses specify
relationships among events or variables
and are empirically tested.
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Operational Definition
• A precise definition of a term in a
hypothesis, which specifies the
operations for observing and measuring
the process or phenomenon being
measured.
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Principle of Falsifiability
• The principle that a scientific theory
must make predictions that are specific
enough to expose the theory to the
possibility of disconfirmation; that is, the
theory must predict not only what will
happen, but also what will not happen.
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Principle of Falsifiability
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Theory
• An organized system of assumptions and
principles that purports to explain a
specified set of phenomena and their
interrelationships.
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Descriptive Studies:
Establishing the Facts
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Case Studies
Observational Studies
Tests
Surveys
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Case Studies
• A detailed description of a particular
individual being studied or treated.
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Observational Studies
• Studies in which the researcher carefully
and systematically observes and records
behavior without interfering with that
behavior; it may involve either
naturalistic or laboratory observation.
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Tests
• Standardize: To develop uniform
procedures for giving and scoring a test.
• Norms: Established standards of
performance.
• Reliability: Consistency of scores derived
from a test.
• Validity: The ability of a test to measure
what it was designed to measure.
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Surveys
• Survey: Questionnaires and interviews
that ask people directly about their
experiences, attitudes, or opinions.
• Representative Sample: A group of
subjects, selected from a population,
which matches the population on
important characteristics.
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Correlational Studies: Looking
for Relationships
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Correlation
• Correlation: A measure of how strongly
two variables are related to one another
• Variables: Characteristics of behavior or
experience that can be measured or
described by a numeric scale
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Types of Correlations
• Positive correlation: Increases in one variable are
associated with increases in the other; decreases are
likewise associated
• Negative correlation: Increases in one variable are
associated with decreases in the other
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The Experiment:
Hunting for Causes
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Experimental Variables
Experimental and Control Conditions
Experimenter Effects
Advantages and Limitations of
Experiments
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Experimental Variables
• Independent Variable:
A variable that an
experimenter
manipulates.
• Dependent Variable:
A variable than an
experimenter predicts
will be affected by
manipulations of the
independent variable.
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Experiments
• Experiment: A controlled test of a
hypothesis in which the researcher
manipulates one variable to discover its
effect on another.
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Experimental and
Control Conditions
• Experimental Condition: In an
experiment, a condition in which
subjects are exposed to manipulations of
the independent variable.
• Control Condition: A comparison
condition in which subjects are not
exposed to the same treatment as in the
experimental condition.
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Experimental Design
• Hypothesis: Nicotine
in cigarettes impairs
driving.
• All conditions kept
the same for both
groups except
nicotine.
– Control condition
is given placebo
(inactive)
cigarettes
• Number of collisions
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Random Assignment
• A procedure for assigning people to
experimental and control groups in
which individuals have the same
probability as an other of being assigned
to either group.
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Placebo
• An inactive substance
or fake treatment
used as a control in
an experiment or
given by a
practitioner to a
patient.
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Experimenter Effects
• Unintended changes in subjects’
behavior due to cues inadvertently given
by the experimenter
• Double-Blind Study: Experiment where
neither subjects nor people running the
study know which subjects are in the
control group and which are in the
experimental group until after results
are tallied.
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Advantages and Limitations
of Experiments
• Experiments allow conclusions about causeeffect relationships.
• Participants in experiments are not always
representative of larger population.
– Much psychology research is carried out
using colleges students as participants.
• Field Research: Descriptive or experimental
research conducted in a natural setting outside
the laboratory.
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Evaluating the Findings
• Why Psychologists Use Statistics
• From the Laboratory to the Real World
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Why Psychologists Use
Statistics
• Descriptive Statistics: Organize and
summarize data
• Inferential Statistics: Assess how
meaningful results are, such as
differences between groups.
– Significance tests assess how likely it
is that a study’s results occurred
merely by chance
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From the Laboratory to the
Real World
• Choosing the Best Explanation
– Sometimes there are competing
explanations for the same events
• Judging the Result’s Importance
– Statistical significance does not prove
that a result is important, only that it
is reliable
– Meta-analysis combines and analyzes
data from many studies
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Different Research Methods
• Cross-Sectional
Study: Subjects of
different ages are
compared at a given
time.
• Longitudinal Study:
Subjects are followed
and periodically
reassessed over a
period of time
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