Psych Web Lecture Number One

9/12/2011 7:34:00 PM

Intro to psych When you think about psychology what comes to mind? The brain, sensation et perception, memory, language, animal behavior, friendship, stress The study of ourselves Psychology is really about you. For example how we spot a familiar face in a crowd? How do social relationships affect your personality and etc. Hence psychology teaches us how we think, feel, develop and learn furthermore psychology teaches us about ourselves. Psych in our daily lives To think like a psychologist one needs to hone their skills to think critically of a situation. If one trusts their gut feeling or what somebody tells them this could lead to sloppy thinking. (this is how many urban myths are passed on) Example: the water flowing the opposite ways in the northern hemisphere and we use 10% of our brains (myths) History of Psych (psychs parents) Ebbinghaus began a popular textbook on psych in 1908. Psyche in greek means the soul, 150 years psych was created before that the study of the mind was told from the perspective of philosophy and physiology. Philosophers Thousands of years before psych, philosophers like Aristotle and plato asked questions such as how do we learn and where does knowledge come from. Furthermore Rene Descartes suggest that the mind and body were two different entities and were linked in a dualistic relationship. Physiologys influence Muller analogized the messages transmitted by nerves were as to a electrical current flowing through a metal conductor. Furthermore, Helm Holtz measured the speed of never impulses he found them to be 90 feet/second. Psych as independent field Historians believe the starting point in the field of psych was in 1879 when German scientist Willheim Wundt opened the first psych lab. He believed that psych would be studied using the same tools used by chemists and physicists. One of Wundts most famous students went on and opened the first psych lab in NA in1883. Later Hall found the APA (American

Psychological Association in 1892 which is now the worlds largest psych organization. Looking Ahead Early the focus of psych was on the mind with very little attention paid to the brain. Nowadays many new technologies allow researchers to draw more direct links from brain to behavior. The Three levels of analysis Psychological Level Using a psych level on may be more interested in studying how emotions, memories, and patterns of thinking are effecting the patient. Biological Level Using a bio level a psychologist may study the role of key neurotransmitters. Environmental Level If a psychologist uses an environmental level he may study the conditions that triggered the problem. Besides the three levels of analysis a psychologist may more specifically approach a problem from a perspective which has specific goals. Commonly uses perspectives are: Behavioral, cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, evolutionary, and socio-cultural. Behavioral Perspective John B Watson is known to be the father of behaviorism, according to this perspective overt behavior is the only valid means of measure in psych. Watson argued the mind to be an off limits black box that takes inputs and makes output. What happens inside the black box should be outside the domain of science well at least for the time being. Hence many researchers focus on designing carefully controlled experiments to understand the influence of environmental level of analysis behavior. Watson believed in the role of nurture over nature and he even said that if you give me a dozen healthy kids he guarantee to train one of them into a specialist field. Example doctor, lawyer, thief, and even beggar man. The strong nurture view was also Carried by BF skinner, he argues that everything we want to know about an organism can be understood by the studying its behavior. You dont need to speculate on internal mental process of hunger or cravings to understand if you give an animal food and it

begins to eat. Furthermore, an animal will continue a behavior if it leads to something pleasant and will stop doing it if it leads to something unpleasant. Nowadays scientists have moved away from exclusively focuses on the environment and have began to dig into the black box and this has lead to many new discoveries. Which bridges the behavioral perspective with other perspectives. Structural Perspective can be defined as behavior perspective The Cognitive Perspective The internal events of the mind were abandoned in order for psych to become a science. However not everyone agreed to this change, in the 1960s the cognitive revolution argued that psychology must return to an interest of internal events of the mind. A pure cognitive perspective operates at the psychological level of analysis and is not concerned of describing the mind in terms of physiology of the brain. For example: a model car can help us understand the physical structure of a real car. Furthermore, we can also use models to understand complex processes such as memory. Sue proposes a single memory model in which she says memories are stored. However lets say her single memory model doesnt accurately capture everything we know about memory she proposes a more complex model this one has two steps a short term memory and a long term memory model. In which temporary information goes into short term memory and permanent information goes into long term. One may question that you can never be sure that a particular model is the way the mind actually works. The great thing about model is that they are provide us with the base to describe data and generate interesting testable questions. And if the old model seems out of date and incorrect some new changes or new data may be added to the old model to revise it. So no cognitive psychologist should assume their model is the best one, its only the most useful one until a better one comes out. Biological Perspective and Reductionism

Human behavior can be reduced to the biology to the brain. A biological perspective states that all human behavior can be understood by reducing the problem to the biology of the brain. And further reduced, to cellular, molecular, atomic. However reductionism doesnt seem to be enough to fully explain all of humans thoughts and behavior, but if additional levels are added they can enrich the behavior type. Neuroimaging Back in the old days they did some wack ass stuff to try to get into the heads of patients and experimentees but nowadays you can get a functional MRI or a Structural MRI. Functional MRI: Sees what the brain is doing Structure MRI: self explanatory Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives The question arises why men are more aggressive are than woman a neuroscienctist would say that due to the elevated test in men however a psychologist adopting an evolutionary perspective may say it might be an adaptive sense for men to be more aggressive than woman. Because in evolution men may be more aggressive than woman (fighting with eachother to impress woman and such all) Developmental psychologists focus on how genetic and environmental factors affect the changes in a behavior in a lifespan. Evolutionary psychologists are interested in those fields too however in a much larger time period of thousands of years. The developmental psychologist experiment. Develop psych want to do an experiment to see when a infant cant tell individuals apart. So they showed a baby a picture and when the baby gets bored they show a picture of another individual if the baby thinks the new picture is a of a new person they will laugh and smile but if they cant recognize the picture they remained bored. This process Is called habituation. The socio-cultural perspective: this perspective focuses on how individuals are influenced by other people and culture. Typically psychologists are interested in three things the influence on an individual on a group, a group on an individual and a group on group. If a social

psychologist is interested how in understanding how crowds react in an emergency situations, the soc pscyh will creat an artificial social situation. All experiments must pass the standards of the University Research Ethics Board. Case Study: Depression: Behaviour Perspective: will ask what are the behaviours associated with depression and how can they be changed? Learning to be helpless, (study in animal may work in humans) if you keep learning that your helpless you will get accustomed to your situation and may over come depression. No matter what perspective they are all interconnected.

9/12/2011 7:34:00 PM

9/12/2011 7:34:00 PM