Psych 104

Scientific study of mind and behaviour (psych: mind/brain, ology: study of)

Private events that happen inside a person; not seen by others

Public events (things said and done); potentially observed by others

Early history of psychology is filled with accomplishments of White men (eurocentric) (it is more diverse now)

Great deal of diversity and opportunities to advance the study of psychology for women and people of color were severely limited.

- Rene Descartes

- Thomas Hobbes

(1596– 1650): Philosopher who argued for dualism of mind and body

Philosopher who argued that the idea of how biology impacts what we see (behavior) is separate (dualism) = there is a mind (soul) that controls your outward behaviors of the body (touch a stove -> jerk hand back)

Believed that the physical body was a container for the nonphysical thing called the mind (soul)

Thought that the pineal gland housed the soul (mind) because there was only one of them (2 of everything else)

Embraced philosophical dualism (mind and body are fundamentally different things)

(1588–1679): Argued against Descartes

Argued that the mind is what the brain does = the mind itself is part of the brain (material = meat) that does all the behavioral things

Espoused philosophical materialism (all mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena)

So, which philosopher was right? Hobbes (manipulate the brain = control behaviors -> take drugs = influences behavior)

(1632– 1704): English philosopher argued that there is a real world

Suggested perceptions of the world are like photographs

Championed philosophical realism (perception of the physical world produced entirely by sensory organ information)

Locke’s phrase “the pursuit of happiness” is also the name of a Canadian power pop group from the late 1980s to early 1990s.

When you perceive the physical world using senses, all the sense info gets represented in your brain (analog copy -> straight copy)

(1724–1804): Suggested that Locke’s theory was too simplistic

Theorized beings must be born with some basic knowledge of the world that allows them to acquire additional knowledge of the world

Philosophical idealism: Perceptions of the physical world are the brain's best interpretation of the information that enters through our sensory apparatus.

We don’t just create an exact copy, but also add info about the world in our internal representations (you might experience the same experience as someone else but they may experience something dif from you -> idealism = what we perceive, we interpret and interpret the ideal interpretation -> the brains best interpretation (a little digital conversion))

All knowledge is acquired through experience (nurture)

emphasizes the role of environment and experience in shaping an individual's knowledge and behavior

Some knowledge is innate (present at birth) rather than acquired (nature)

many aspects of our behavior and cognition are hardwired into our biology

Wake up when we stop breathing while sleeping

Most modern psychologists embrace some version of nativism.

But research suggests that at least some of what we know is hardwired into our brains.

Both nature and nurture helps us interpret the world around us and gain knowledge?

(1821–1894): Studied human reaction time; estimated the length of nerve impulse

Sensory input from the environment, anything that you read from an environment

behavioral output

Amount of time between the onset of a stimulus and a person’s response to that stimulus

ex) someone throws a ball at you and you dodge or catch it

- structuralism

- (1832–1920): Opened the first psychological laboratory

Believed psychology’s primary goal should be to understand:

“the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations, so that it may ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations.”

Trying to isolate and analyze the basic elements of the mind -> have to use introspection

Taught the world’s first psychology course and published the world’s first psychology textbook

Opened the world’s first psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig

Was the advisor to 184 PhD students, many of whom became well-known psychologists

Approach that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind’s basic elements, finding the underlying structure

- structuralism

- (one of wundt's grad students) (1867–1927): Pioneered introspection (systematic self-observation)

Analysis of subjective experience by trained observers; basic dimensions of sensation

Which are the basic sensations everyone experiences?

Studied under Wundt; focused on identifying basic elements of the mind

Was not the first to try to identify the elements of conscious experience

Structuralism did not last. Can you guess why? Trying to break it down into parts but don’t know what it is, didn’t really do much

- functionalism

(1842–1910): Together with other psychologists (e.g., John Dewey, James Angell) developed a new approach to psychology -> functionalism

Inspired by Charles Darwin

- Emphasized the adaptive significance of mental processes

- mental processes and behaviors, emphasizing how they help individuals adapt to their environments

- functionalism

(1809–1882)

Inspired James; wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

Natural selection: Process by which specific attributes that promote an organism’s survival and repro- duction become more prevalent in the population over time

Traits are selected bc of it’s survival value -> adapt those traits

The ones that survived gave birth to others that had that same thing that made them survive

Phobias: scared of heights -> don’t fall to death, fear of illness -> don’t get sick as much (William James and Charles Darwin)

- functionalism

(1825–1893) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947): Studied hysteric patients through hypnosis

- functionalism

- Loss of function that has no obvious physical origin; influenced Sigmund Freud

- Psychoanalytic theory

(1856–1939): Believed hysteria caused by painful unconscious experiences (trauma)

- created the Psychoanalytic theory

- ID

- preconscious

- unconscious

- Superego

- EGO (in our conscious)

- your unconscious affects displayed behavior

- responds directly and immediately to basic urges, needs, and desires

A part in the middle is

bring things from unconscious to conscious

think of personality as iceberg -> above water = consciousness, below water (can’t see) = unconscious

- is in unconscious and conscious

- keeps the ID in check

Conflict between the ID and superego -> EGO

- The approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behaviour

- Pavlov, Watson, skinner, thorndike

- behaviourism

Influenced skinner starting to study behaviourism

Studied the physiology of digestion and founded classical conditioning (stimulus–response)

Stimulus

Response

Dogs would salivate when people in white lab coats walked in -> lab students were feeding the dogs -> dogs thought that white lab coats meant they would get fed

Realised they could make them salivate to other stimuli

Stim: Object or event that elicits a response from an organism

Response: Action or physiological change elicited by a stimulus

Emergence of behaviourism

Influenced by Pavlov; goal was to predict and control behaviour through the study of observable behaviour

Argued that behaviourism should be study of relationship between stimulus and response

Looked at fear conditioning in babies

Unethical

Conditioned fear into babies

Direct/predict and control behaviour?

- behaviourism

Developed the conditioning chamber (Skinner box)

Principle of reinforcement

worked with rats -> press a level and it would dispense food (Skinner box)

Rewarding outcome -> increase behaviour -> repeat behaviour

Outcome that’s not rewarded -> not repeated

Any behaviour that is rewarded will be repeated, and any behaviour that isn’t rewarded won’t be repeated.

Tichener, wundt

James, darwin

Freud, neo-freudian, jung, adler

pavlov, skinner, watson, thorndike 

Max Wertheimer

- cognitive psychology

Founded induced-motion phenomena

 Illusions: Errors of perception, memory, or judgement in which subjective experience differs from objective reality; illusionary motions

Gestalt psychology: Psychological approach that emphasizes how the mind creates perceptual experience; the whole rather than the sum of the parts is often perceived

Circle with 2 lines looks like a face even though it really doesn’t 

Interpreting it as a whole instead of a circle and 2 lines inside

- cognitive psychology

Argued that memory is not a simple recording device; our minds use their theories of how the world usually works

Researched why people often remembered what they had expected to read rather than what they had read.

Looked at memory

People read indigenous story (colonisers) and then convey the meanings of that story -> your memory of that story was not 1-1 (abstraction/ interpretation) -> the way you describe it correlates to your past experiences?

Loftus

False memories

Shows that eyewitness testimony isn’t great (can lead to false convictions)

Jean Piaget

Theorized the mind has theories about how the mind works

Small children have not yet learned these theories; they see the world in a fundamentally different way than adults do.

Looking at the changes in your behaviour across age?

Realized that children don’t think like adults -> don't realize that other people can see/interpret different things

With Lev Vygotsky created area of developmental psychology

How children learn certain cognitive processes progresses as they age

Looked ar social factors as well as development 

Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch, Gordon Allport

- social psychology

Argued behaviour is not a function of the environment but the person’s subjective construal of the environment

Contended that people react to the world as they see it and not to the world as it is

When you start following something -> you tend to keep following instead of switching your thinking/views

- social psychology

Researched how people draw inferences about others

Conducted early studies of the “primacy effect”

Led to research on how people draw inferences about others

Conformity: can influence someone's response as a collective (collective says the wrong answer on purpose -> individual says the wrong answer even though they most likely know the right one)

can influence someone's response as a collective (collective says the wrong answer on purpose -> individual says the wrong answer even though they most likely know the right one)

- social psychology

Studied how people form stereotypes and prejudices

 Social psychology and developmental psychology

How children learn certain cognitive processes progresses as they age

Looked ar social factors as well as development 

Evolutionary psychology

Every organism is evolved to respond to particular stimuli in particular ways

Evolutionary psychology

Social behaviour has been shaped by natural selection

Neuroscience 

Had the crucial insight that damage to a specific part of the brain impaired a specific mental function

He demonstrated that the brain and mind are closely linked.

Found Brosac area (in brain) -> damage = speech dysfunction (inability to produce words)

Neuroscience 

Concluded from surgically altered rat brains that learning is not “localized.”

It is not tied to a specific brain area in the same way that language seems to be

Studied what parts of the brain impacted what behaviours in rats

- Neuroscience 

- was a Canadian psychologist whose work has had a profound impact on cognitive neuroscience

- Strength of synaptic connectors

Neuroscience 

a Canadian psychologist, discovered the critical importance of a specific part of the brain, the hippocampus, to memory.

People with damaged hippocampus -> main area that’s dedicated to acquiring memories

Both of them helped found cognitive neuropsychology (how brain affects behaviours)

Cultural psychology

1. Background info: 

2. Hypothesis: 

3. Design Experiment

4. Collect data: 

5. Analyze data: 

6. Generate conclusions and publications

1. Stimulus -> Response (S-R psychology)

2. Stimulus -> Organisms thought -> Response (S-O-R psychology)

Quicker than S-O-R psychology bc the thought does not have to cross hemispheres (left shoulder squeezed and you must squeeze the left shoulder of the person in front of you) -> so it’s just a stimulus and response

Takes longer because the thought has to come from the right hemisphere (since your left shoulder was squeezed) and be passed to the left hemisphere in order to squeeze the right shoulder of the pearson in front of you

- positive skew: tail more pronounced on right side, most of the scores are on the negative side -> left side

- negative skew: the tail is more pronounced on the left rather than the right, most of the scores are on the positive side -> right side

Belief that accurate knowledge can be acquired through observation; essential element in scientific method

- Description of the tendency to cling to one’s beliefs

- In the face of contradicting evidence, people will still cling to their contradicting beliefs -> should be unbiased and look to the data for not be dogmatic

- background info

- hypothesis

- design experiment

- collect data

- analyze data

- generate conclusions/ publications

- Explanation of a natural phenomenon; can never be proved right

- Set of rules that can govern many hypothesi

- gives context for your research. It summarizes what is already known about the topic, explains why the study is important, and sets up the specific questions you want to answer.

- literacy search

- find primary or secondary sources to support you

- Testable, falsifiable educated guess -> yes or no question 

- Independent (manipulate)/ dependent variable (measure)

- Ex) Does playing vball twice a week for 2 hrs each time decrease the symptoms of depression

- variable you manipulate

- what you think will cause an effect

variable you measure (changes bc of the independent variable)

- has all of the other variables/ groups

- controlled variable

- control group

- experimental group

- confounding or extraneous variables

- participant variables

- 1. the factors that are kept constant throughout an experiment

- 2. the group that does not receive the treatment or intervention. benchmark to compare against experimental group.

- 3. the group that receives the treatment or intervention being tested.

- 1. factors that can influence the dependent variable, potentially skewing the results. They can make it difficult to determine if the independent variable is truly causing any observed effects. Other factors that we can't control

- 2. individual differences among participants (such as age, gender, or health) that can affect the outcome of the experiment.

- interpret the data collected during the experiment to determine what it means in the context of your hypothesis

- mean, median, mode

- variability (SD, SE)

- descriptive parameters/ statistics or inferential statistics

- mean: The average of a set of numbers, calculated by adding them together and dividing by the number of values

- median: The middle value in a sorted list of numbers; if there's an even number of values, it's the average of the two middle numbers

- mode: The value that appears most frequently in a data set

- standard deviation: how spread out the values in a data set are around the mean; a low SD indicates values are close to the mean, while a high SD indicates more spread

- standard error: how much the sample mean is expected to vary from the true population mean; it's calculated as the SD divided by the square root of the sample size

- range: Value of the largest measurement in a frequency distribution minus the value of the smallest measurement

Methods for summarizing and organizing data, providing simple summaries about the sample and the measures (like mean, median, and mode)

random and stratified sampling

everyone in the population has an equal likelihood of being selected

- population is divided into distinct subgroups (strata) based on certain characteristics (like age, gender, or income)

- Participants are then randomly selected from each stratum

- Set of rules and techniques for observation

- People are difficult to study because of their complexity, variability, and reactivity.

- NECC

- naturalistic observation

- experimental design

- case study

- correlation analysis

- people should not know you are watching

- Technique for gathering scientific information by unobtrusively observing people in their natural environments

- the structured plan used to conduct an experiment, outlining how to collect and analyze data to test a hypothesis

- Pros: only method that allows interpretation of causality, high internal validity (this variable affected that variable)

- Cons: low external validity

look at something in depth, very detailed case (one or few individual that has a particular disease -> very in depth analysis)

a statistical method used to assess the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables

experimental design

- random

- stratified

- frequency distribution

- normal distribution

Graphic representation showing the number of times in which the measurement of a property takes on each of its possible values

Mathematically defined frequency distribution in which most measurements are concentrated around the middle

Relationship between variables in which variations in the value of one variable are synchronized with variations in the value of the other

- positive correlation

- negative correlation

- more-is-more relationship (as one variable inc the other one inc)

- "+1.0" is a perfect positive correlation

- more-is-less relationship (as one inc -> the other one decreases)

- "-1.0" is a perfect positive correlation

- Natural correlation between two variables cannot be taken as evidence of a causal relationship between them because a third variable might be causing them both.

- manipulate

- measure

- compare