Chapter 1

Philosophy

• Rene Descartes
  • Dualism (interactionism): mind and body are separate distinct entities involved in the production of behavior (pineal gland)
• Thomas Hobbes
  • Materialism: nothing exists other than matter and energy, the concept of soul is meaningless
  • Monism: only one thing produces behavior, Free will does not exist
  • Empiricism: “how the world out there” rather than “how the world is”

Birth of psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt
  • Studied consciousness: one’s awareness of immediate experience
  • Perception, emotion
• G. Stanley Hall
• Structuralism Edward Tichener
  • Consciousness into its basic elements
  • Introspection: careful, systematic observation of conscious experience
• Functionalism William James
  • Function or purpose of conscious, evolutional theory
• Behaviorism John B. Watson
  • Study of human and animal behavior, determinism rather than free will
  • Abandons introspection
• Psychoanalytic School Sigmund Freud
  • Hysteria
  • Unconscious determinants of behavior/personality/motivation
    • Hypnosis
    • Dream interpretation
    • Free association
    • Slip of the tongue (Freudian Slips)
  • Determinist
  • Unconscious motives: eros (life), thanoatos (death)
• Behaviorism B.F. Skinner
  • Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes
  • Determinism: “free will is an illusion”
• Humanism Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow

Psychology today

• Cognitive: mental processes
• Biological: how the brain is important

Chapter 2

Research & methods

• Self-report measures
• reports by others
• behavioral observations
• physiological measures – more objective

• confounding: occurs when value of extraneous variable changes across the conditions of experiment
• quasi-experiments: does not control the influence of all extraneous variables
  • often arise in situations where it is not possible to randomly assign subjects

Evaluation of experimental methods

• Advantages:
  • 1. Establish cause/effect relationships
  • 2. Control over extraneous variable
• Limitations:
  • 1. Often artificial
  • 2. Lack generalizability
  • 3. Threats to internal validity

Evaluation of correlation method

• Advantages:
  • 1. Flexible
  • 2. Behavior assess in “real world”
  • 3. Allows prediction of behavior
• Limitations
  • 1. Cannot establish causality

Correlation

• -1.00 < r < +1.00
• Sign tells you direction of relationship
• Absolute value tells you strength of relationship
•