Psychology

– discipline concerned with behaviour and mental processes and how they

are affected by an organism’s physical state, mental state, and external

environment.

– It is based on empirical evidence. Rely heavily on it.

Behaviour

– The observable actions by which an organism adjusts to its environment.

– Outer sign of inner reality.

Great thinkers of the past relied on observations based on anecdote and

description of individual cases.

Three Early Psychologies

– Structuralism

– Functionalism

– Psychoanalysis

Functionalism

– emphasized the function or purpose of behaviour and consciousness as

oppose to its analysis and description.

– Emphasizes the “how” and “why” of mental behaviour.

Structuralism

– examined the basic elements of the mind.

– Emphasizes the “what” of mental behaviour.

– Basic elements of sensation reveal the underlying structure of the mind.

– Involved the analysis of the basic elements or building blocks of the mind.

– Analyze sensations, images, and feelings into basic elements.

– Emphasized the analysis of immediate experience into basic elements.

Introspection – systematic examination of individual reports on their own

thought and feelings about sensory experiences.

Wilhelm Wundt

– established the first psychological laboratory in 1879.

First person to announce that he intended to make psychology as science.

John Dewey

– Brought functionalism to North America.

– Application of functionalism to “progressive education.”

William James – founder of functionalism.

Humanism – a movement that emerged in the 1960s and rejected

psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

Sigmund Freud

– founded the field of psychoanalysis.

– Argued that conscious awareness is merely the tip of a mental iceberg.

Beneath the visible tip lies the unconscious part of the mind, containing

unrevealed wishes, passions, guilty secrets, unspeakable yearnings, and

conflicts between desire and duty.

Psychoanalysis – a theory of personality and a method of psychotherapy

that emphasizes unconscious motives and conflicts.

E.B. Titchener – brought structuralism to North America (1892).

James Mark Baldwin – first Canadian psychology lab, U of T (1889).

Gestalt Psychology

– Max Wertheimer

– How elements of experience become what we understand as the whole

experience.

– The whole is greater than, and different from, the of its part.

Major Psychological Perspectives

Biological Perspective

– emphasizes bodily events and changes associated with actions, feelings,

and thoughts.

– Evolutionary Psychology

– Behaviour explained in terms of underling physical structures and

biochemical processes.

– Focus on the functioning of the genes, nervous system, and endocrine

system.

Cognitive Perspective – focuses on how people reason, remember,

understand language, and solve problems.

Learning Perspective

– concerned with how the environment and experience affect as person’s

actions.

– It includes behaviourism and social cognitive theories.

Sociocultural Perspective – focuses on social and cultural forces outside the

individual, forces that shape every aspect of behaviour, from how we kiss to

what and where we eat.

Psychodynamic Perspective – emphasizes unconscious dynamics within the

individual, such as inner forces, conflicts, or the movement of instinctual

energy.

Evolutionary Psychology

– may help explain human commonalities in cognition, development,

emotion, social practices, and other areas of behaviour.

– Emphasizes both behavioural and mental adaptiveness.

– Focus on natural selection and the long process of evolution.

Behaviorism

– the study of observable behaviour and the role of the environment and

experience as determinants of behaviour.

– John Watson and B.F. Skinner

– Behaviourists focus on the environmental rewards and punishers that

maintain or discourage specific behaviours.

Social-Cognitive Learning Theorists

– Combined elements of behaviourism with research on thoughts, values,

expectations, and intentions

– They believe that people learn not only by adapting their behaviour to the

environment, but also by imitating others and by thinking about the

events happening around them.

Humanistic Perspective

– Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow

– Emphasizes individual’s inherent capacity for making rational choices and

developing to their full potential.

– Focus on self-actualization and a holistic approach.

Social Psychologists – focus on social rules and roles, how groups affect

attitudes and behaviour, why people obey authority, and how each of us is

affected by other people.

Cultural Psychologists – examine how cultural rules and values – both

explicit and unspoken – affect people’s development, behaviour, and

feelings.

Research – aspect of psychology least recognized and understood by the

public.

Feminist Movement – emerged in the early 1970s.

Psychobabble

– pseudoscience and quackery covered by a veneer of psychological and

scientific-sounding language.

– it promises easy fixes to life’s problems and challenges.

Critical Thinking – is the ability and willingness to assess claims and make

objective judgments on the basis of well-supported reasons and evidence,

rather than emotion of anecdote.

8 Critical Thinking Guidelines:

 Ask Questions and 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

– Assumptions – are beliefs that are taken for granted.

– Bias – when an assumption or belief keeps us from considering the

evidence fairly, or causes us to ignore the evidence completely.

– Occam’s Razor – a critical thinker choose the one that accounts for the

most evidence while making the fewest unverified assumptions.

– Hippocrates – the Greek physician known as the founder of modern

medicine, observed patients with head injuries and inferred that the brain

must be the ultimate source of our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as

well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.

– Stoic philosophers – observed that people do not become angry or sad or

anxious because of actual events, but because of their explanations of

those events.

– John Locke – argued that the mind works by associating ideas arising

from experience, and this notion continues to influence many

psychologists today.

Phrenology

– Franz Joseph Gall

– different brain areas are accounted for specific character and personality

traits, which can be “read” from bumps on the skull.

Three Categories of Professional Activities for Psychologists:

– Teaching and doing research in colleges and universities.

– Providing health or mental-health services (psychological practice).

– Conducting applied research for non-academic settings (business, sports,

government, law, and military).

Two Broad Areas of Research:

– Basic Psychology: pure research conducted to seek knowledge for its own

sake.

– Applied Psychology: finds practical uses for the knowledge gained form

research. It is the study of psychological issues that have directed

practical significance.
Some Major Nonclinical Specialties in Psychology

– Experimental Psychologists – laboratory studies of learning, motivation,

emotion, sensation and perception, physiology, and cognition.

– Educational Psychologists – study psychological principles that explain

learning and search for ways to improve educational systems.

– Developmental Psychologists – study how people grow and change over

time.

– Industrial / Organizational Psychologists – study behaviour in the

workplace.

– Psychometric Psychologists – design and evaluate tests of mental

abilities, aptitudes, interests and personality.

Psychological Practice – Practitioners that work in mental hospitals, general

hospitals, clinics, schools, counseling centres, and private practice:

– Counseling – help with everyday problems.

– School – work with parents and teachers to enhance performance.

– Clinical – diagnose, treat, and study mental and emotional problems.

– Most Clinical Psychologists have a PhD, EdD, or a PsyD.

– 4 or 5 years graduate work in psychology

– 1 year of internship

Clinical Psychologists are NOT:

Psychotherapists: anyone who does any kind psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysts: individuals who have trained in and practice psychoanalysis.

Psychiatrists: medical doctors who diagnose and treat mental disorders.