AP Psychology Chapter 1
Terms
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- Psychology
- the scientific discipline devoted to the study of mental processes and behavior
- Behavior
-
any action or reaction of a living organism which can be observed
Movement, Activity, Action - What are the four fundamental factors that influence behavior?
-
1 Organism
2 Motivation
3 Cognition (knowledge)
4 Competence - Organism
- the biological characteristics of a living biological entity
- Motivation
- what drives the behavior; may include the goal of a behavior;
- Cognition
- what and how the organism thinks, knows, and remembers
- Competence
- the skills and abilities of an organism
- psyche
- soul, form, function, or mind
- Rene Descartes
- (1596-1650); believed in Dualism
- Dualism
- belief that humans have a dual nature; one part mental and one part physical
- Monism
- belief that only one type of nature exists in humans (mix of physical and mental)
- 18th Century Belief
- all mental activities were the work of a particular area of the mind
- Phrenology
- the study of analyzing the mind by examining the shape of the skull
- Gustav Fechner
- (1801-1887); wrote Elements of Psychophysics
- Wilhelm Wundt
- derived the Structuralism theory; studied mainly the concious mind; first laboratory devoted to psychology in Leipzig, Germany;
- Ten Major Approaches
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1 stuchturalism
2 functionalism
3 behaviorism
4 gestalt
5 biological
6 cognitive
7 humanistic
8 psychodynamic
9 evolutionary
10 socio-cultural - Structuralism
- the theory that the mind could be divided into mental elements; concerned with what the mind is
- introspection
- an experimental method where subjects reported the content of their own mind; drawback is that the data can be manipulated by the subjet and the experimenter
- Functionalists
- concerned with what the mind does and why; inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution; behavior and mental processes help organisms to adapt to a changing environment
- Functionalists expanded their studies beyond perception to?
- Learning, Motivation, and Problem Solving,
- William James
- (1842-1910); functionalist; coined the phrase "stream of conciousness" to describe the way the mind experiences perception and thouht as a constant flow of sensation;
- John Dewey
- (1859-1952); a functionalist that introduced the concept of learning and thus adaptation to the evironment;
- Behaviorism
- developed by John B. Watson; believed that the mind was a black box; useful in treating menatally retarded patients;
- John B. Watson
- (1878-1958); Behaviorist; stated that mind didn't even exist; stated that behavior was produced through stimuli(events in one's environment)
- "black box"
- a description of the mind; processed information about the stimuli and then mechanically generated the behavior
- Behaviorists believed
- that all behavior could be broken down into a collection of conditioned reponses(CRs). all behavior was supposed to be the result of learning
-
Leaders in the study of animal behavior were
(it was said that humans and animal behavior weren't different) - Edward C. Tolman (1886-1959); Clark L. Hull (1884-1952); Edwin R. Guthrie (1886-1949)
- Gestalt Psychology
- founded by Max Wetheimer; emphasizes on the organizational processes in behavior, rather then the content of behavior; focuses on problems of perception;
- Gestaltists believe that
- behavior and experiences consisted of patterns and organized sets; "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts";
- Phenomenology
- the idea that behavior is based on subjective perception; stressed by Gestalts;
- W. Kohler
- (1887-1967); argued that learning and problem solving were organizational processes like perception; "moment of insight"
- "Moment of Insight"
- when the solution to a problem suddenly crystallizes as a whole gestalt our of reasoning and intuition;
- Biological psychologists
- study the effect that changes in an organism's physical body or environment have on behavior;
- Biological psychology
- covers genetics, the nervous system, and endocrine system; study the effects of biological factors on eating, drinking, aggression, speech disorders, dyslexia, and learning;
- Ivan Pavlov
- main contributer to biological psychology; got dogs to salivate when a bell rings;
- Cognitive psychology
- concerned with the processes of thinking and memory, as well as attention, imagery, creativity, problem solving, and language use;
- Noam Chomsky
- published his theories generated by rules on language as a system with infinate, nonlearned possibilities;
- Humanistic psychology
- sought to begin a psychology of mental health by studying creative people;
- Carl Rogers
- a humanistic who believed that people are constantly striving to develop their potential;
- self-actualization
- a process of constantly striving to develop your potential; part of humanistic psychology;
- Humanistic psychology grew out of?
- phenomenology and existentialism
- existentialism
- humans' basic existential anxiety is fear of death;
- Psychodynamic approach
- developed by Sigmund Freud; used the process of psychoanalysis;
- Sigmund Freud
- (1856-1939); most famous psychologist who developed psychoanalysis;
- psychoanalysis
- patients work with a therapist to explore their past to discover the sources of their illness by stressing early experience andunconscious "repressed" memories;
- Neo-Freudians
- futher developed his theories to cover women's development, learning throughout life, interpersonal influences on personality, and social interation;
- Neo-Freudians include
- Eric Erikson, Karen Horney, C.G. Jung and Alfred Adler;
- evolutionary psychologists
- explore ways in which some behaviors might be the product of humans' adaption to their environment during the course of evolution;
- socio-cultural approach
- explaining behavior in terms of the ways in which others influence us;
- individualist cultures
- U.S. and Western Europe; encourage people to pursue personal goals rather than group goals;
- collectivist cultures
- Japan and Korea; encourage people to pursue group goals over personal goals;
- subject
- the humans or animals who are observed;
- naturalistic observation
- the systematic observation of an event or phenomenon in the environment as it occurs naturally;
- experimental group
- those exposed to the cause of a certain kind of behavior;
- control group
- those not exposed to the cause of a certain kind of behavior;
- random assignment
- randomly assigining people to the experimental and control groups;
- placeo effect
- behavior being different because the subjects known that they are exposed to a special treatment;
- placebo
- a fake pill so that the control group experiences the placebo effect as well;
- blind study
- a study where the subjects don't know whether they are taking the placebo or the real stuff
- double-blind study
- a study where the subject and the eexperimenters don't know whether they are giving/recieving the placebo or the real stuff;
- Correlational studies
- allow reasearchers to determine whether a relationship exists between two variables;
- positive realtionship
- high scores on one variable tend to be paired with high scores on the second variable;
- negative relationship
- high scores on one variable tend to be paired with low scores on another variable
- correlation coefficient
- describes the strength of the relationship between two variables;
- cross-sectional studies
- people of different ages are assessed at a single point in time;
- cohort
- a group of people born during a particular period of time;
- longitudinal studes
- following a group of people over time;
- cross-sequential studes
- following people of different ages over time; combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal studiesd;
- surveys
- used to discover beliefs, opinions, and attitudes; used to find a corrilation based upon age, gender, social class, and so on;
- case studies
- where a single individual is studied intensely to examine a problem or issue relevant to that person; used a lot by Freud;
- reliablity
- refers to the consistency of individuals' performances on a test;
- test-retest reliability
- refers to the extent that overall scores on a psychological test are consistent from one test to the next;
- internal-consistency reliability
- refers to the consistency of scores across items within a test;
- validity
- whether a test measures what the examiner wants it to measure;
- construct validity
- the extent to which scores on a test are related to scores on other similiar tests;
- criterion-related validity
- how effective a test is in predicting an individual's behavior in specified situations;
- IRB
- Institutional Review Boards; review boards to determine the ethical implications of all research;
- informed consent
- telling subjects all features of the experiment prior to the study;
- descriptive statistics
- used to describe the data that you collect
- central tendency
- the values around which people's scores on some measure tend to "clump"
- mean, median, mode, range
- average, middle, most frequent, distance between highest and lowest
- variability
- how spread out the scores are from the average;
- standard deviation
- how far scores tend to fall from the mean;
- normal distribution curve
- one standard deviation, 68%; two standard deviations, 95%
- inferential statistics
- allow you to make inferences about popultions based upon the characteristics of your sample;
- sample, population
- a representative subset; the larger group, such as all Americans;
- significance level
- the level at which your results become significant instead of by chance; psychologists generally used 5% or .05