Transcript Psychology 020 Mike Boisvert 1

Psychology 020
Mike Boisvert
1
Course Information
Contact Info:
Email: [email protected]
Office hours: by appointment
Evaluations:
4 multiple-choice exams (each 2-hr)
Thought paper
2
Thought Paper
• News reports of published research
• “Ask Patty” type articles
• Reports of health campaigns
• etc..
•What are your thoughts on this
article?
•Did the article ignore important
details from the study it quotes?
•Does the article raise an important
issue? Why do you think it is an
important issue?
3
Course Objectives
•
•
•
•
•
Understand historical roots of Psychology
Understand scientific method/research methods
used by psychologists
Understand major theoretical perspectives
within Psychology
Understand principles, theories, findings of
subfields of Psychology
Be able to critically evaluate information
presented in popular media about Psychology
4
What is Psychology?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Clinical
Counseling
Cognitive
Developmental
Social
Educational
Personality
Organizational
And many, many more
5
The Common Elements?
• Behavior and thought
• Psychology is the scientific study of
behavior and the mind
6
What Psychology is Not
•
•
•
•
Psychics
ESP
Sitting in a leather chair and thinking
Those people that you see on ‘Oprah’
7
Why Psychology?
Why study behavior and the mind?
1. Pretty pervasive parts of being human
2. May provide answers about big
questions (e.g. our origins)
3. Helping people
4. Informs other fields too (medicine,
biology, marketing, etc.)
8
Where did Psychology come
from?
•
Physiology, philosophy, and biology got
freaky and out came PSYCHOLOGY
•
Psychology emerged in the 19th century
once folks accepted the idea that
behavior and the mind could be studied
scientifically
9
Those Nutty Philosophers
• Rene Decartes (15961650)
• We are machines with a
soul
• Mind and body as
separate
• Animals have no soul
10
Those Nutty Philosophers
• British Empiricists
• Thomas Hobbes (15881679)
• Contents of mind rest
on experience
• John Locke (1632-1704)
• ‘white paper’ or tabula
rasa
11
Those Nutty Physiologists
• Sechenov and Pavlov
• Role of reflexes
• Flourens and Broca
• Localization of function
12
Those Nutty Biologists
• Charles Darwin
• Possible to explain origins
of humanity without
requiring religion
• “On the Origin of Species”,
1859
• Part-time bass player for ZZ
Top
13
Those Nutty Psychologists
• Die ersten Psychologen
waren deutsch
• Wilhelm Wundt
• Opened first psych lab at U of
Leipzig (1879)
• Simple experiments to study
sensations, memories,
judgments
14
Wundt’s Experiments
• This is an analog of one of his
experiments..
• Instructions:
• Phase 1:
• Place the palm of your left hand on your desk
• When you see a colored shape lift your hand
off your desk and raise it above your head
• Do this as quickly as you can
15
Reaction time = 0.20 sec
16
Wundt’s Experiments
• OK, that was the easy task
• Instructions:
• Phase 2:
• Place both hands on your desk
• If the circle is red raise your left hand, but if it
is green raise your right hand
• Do this as quickly as you can
17
Reaction time (RT) = 0.29 sec
18
Wundt’s Experiments
• RT(phase 2) – RT(phase1) = time required to
perform mental events
• Mental events were the judgment about
color and the response decision
• RTphase 1 = 0.20 s
RTphase2 = 0.29
s
• Time required for categorization/decision =
0.09 s
19
Also in Europe…
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Psychoanalysis
• Unconscious mental conflicts
• We’ll come back to Freud later
20
It’s Not a Purse…It’s
European
• Ethology
• Lorenz, Tinbergen,
von Frisch
• Naturalistic studies
of animals
• Innate behaviors
21
Meanwhile in the USA
• Behaviorism
• Reaction against
introspection
• John B. Watson (1878-1958)
•
•
•
•
“Mind” is bogus concept
Role of environment
Expanding animal research
From 1920s on behaviorism
became dominant tradition in
psychology
22
Behaviorism
• B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
• “Radical behaviorist”
• Developed new apparatus for
testing animal behavior,
“Skinner box”
• These things are still
commonly used to study
animal behavior
23
Cognitive Psychology
• Behaviorism began to wane in the 1960s
• Factors:
• Increasing focus on biological basis of
behavior
• Rise of computers – new analogy for
the brain
• Hardware: physical machinery of brain
• Software: steps involved in acquiring,
processing, storing input
24
You say you want a
revolution?
• Prominent figures in the early
cognitive revolution
• Jean Piaget
• Children’s reasoning abilities
• Kids pass through mental stages in
which reasoning becomes more
advanced
• Noam Chomsky
• Language as a system of mental
rules
• Rules based on innate capacities of
mind
25