Transcript Psychology - Blogs@UWW

The Social Sciences:
Psychology
1
What Is Psychology?

Scientific study of behavior and mental
processes in contexts


Behavior: Things people do that can be
directly observed
Mental Processes: Thoughts, feelings,
motives; cannot be observed directly
2
What Is Psychology?

Scientific study of behavior and mental
processes in contexts


Scientific: Systematic empirical observation;
observe, describe, explain, and predict behavior
Contexts: Historical, cultural, biological, social
factors that influence behavior
3
Psychology is not
obsessed with Freud



APA membership:
Less than 10%
APS membership:
Less than 5%
Why?

Freud did not use
controlled
experimentation
4
Psychology is not
obsessed with Freud



APA membership:
Less than 10%
APS membership:
Less than 5%
Why?

He built complicated
theories without
resting on reliable, replicable behavioral
relationships
5
Diversity of modern psychology
6
Diversity of modern psychology

Systems of thinking/frameworks for
research






Psycholanalytic
Behavioral
Neurobiological
Humanistic
Cognitive
Sociocultural
7
Psychoanalytic Perspective

Emphasizes unconscious aspects of the
mind, conflict between instincts and societal
demands, and early family experiences in
the formation of personality and behavior
8
Freud’s theory of normal personality

Id


Pleasure principle
Ego




Life instinct (Eros)
Death instinct
(Thanatos)
Reality principle
Superego

Internalized parent,
conscience
9
Freud’s Effect on Psychology
Criticisms


Method of data collection
very subjective
Concepts difficult to
measure

Dogmatic, closed system

Overemphasis on sex

Self-fulfilling research

Long and costly treatment

Theory was never wrong!
Contributions




First comprehensive theory
of personality
Psychoanalysis
Explanations of normal
behavior
Generalizing psychology to
other areas of human
existence
11
Behavioral Perspective

Emphasizes scientific study of observable
behavioral responses and their
environmental determinants
12
Classical Conditioning
13
Classical Conditioning
14
Classical Conditioning
15
Classical Conditioning
16
Operant Conditioning

Operant: Freely-emitted behavior that
influences (or operates on) the environment

Behavior occurs
17
Operant Conditioning

Operant: Freely-emitted behavior that
influences (or operates on) the environment


Behavior occurs
Followed by a consequence
18
Operant Conditioning

Operant: Freely-emitted behavior that
influences (or operates on) the environment



Behavior occurs
Followed by a consequence
Future chances of that behavior are determined
by the consequence
19
20
Operant Conditioning


Environment selects behavior with
reinforcement, punishment, extinction
Reinforcers


Punishers


Increase the probability of the behavior
Decrease the probability of the behavior
Extinction

Behavior has no consequence; drops out
21
Neurobiological Perspective

Emphasizes the roles of the brain and the
nervous system in behavior, thought, and
emotion
22
Neuroscience


Humans only use approximately 10% of
their brains.
NOT TRUE!
23
Neuroscience


If 90% of your brain were removed, you
would have a brain the size of a sheep’s
brain
Disorders and diseases that affect small
parts of the brain can drastically affect
behavior
24
Neuroscience

Brain imaging shows we use our ENTIRE
brain
25
Humanistic Perspective

Emphasizes a person’s capacity for personal
growth and people’s positive qualities





What makes people happy and healthy?
Free will
Subjective reality
Person’s uniqueness, unique worth
Self-understanding
26
Abraham Maslow

Founder of humanistic
psychology
27
The Hierarchy of Needs
28
Cognitive Perspective

Emphasizes mental
processes involved in
knowing






Attention
Perception
Memory
Learning
Problem solving
Thought processes
29
The Human-Computer Metaphor


Human-Computer Metaphor of Mind:
The mind is what the brain does
How are the operations of a computer
determined?



Physical workings?
Programming?
Programs are independent of the physical
systems that run them
30
The Human-Computer Metaphor

Both:






Accept (or encode) information
Manipulate information (symbols)
Store information in memory
Retrieve information from memory
Use information to make responses
Mind is essentially a program implemented
in a meat-machine
31
Sociocultural Perspective

Emphasizes influence of culture, ethnicity,
and gender (among other social factors) as
key to understanding behavior, thought,
emotion
32
Social Psychology

Scientific study of how people think about,
influence, and relate to one another

The power of the situation
33
The Fundamental Attribution Error

When explaining the behavior of others, we




Attribute their behavior to internal factors
And we ignore external factors
We overestimate the influence of personality
We underestimate the power of the situation
34
Social Psychology

Scientific study of how people think about,
influence, and relate to one another




The power of the situation
Social thought and social behavior often do not
fit into “rational” or “logical” theories
Importance of perceptions of the situation
Social thought and social behavior are a
function of both the person and the situation
35
Cross-Cultural Psychology



Compare psychological processes in
different cultures
Most psychological research has been
conducted in the U.S., U.K., Canada
Cross-cultural psychologists attempt to
discover if psychological laws hold
everywhere

Does the concept of the self look the same in all
cultures?
36