PSYA01 UTSC Chapter notes. Introduction to Psychology.

Chapter 1

Without Soul

• Psychology: the scientific study of behavior, thought, and experience, and how they can be affected by physical, mental, social and environmental factors. 

• Scientific model: way of learning about the world through collecting observations, developing theories to explain them, and using the theories to make predictions. 

o Hypothesis: testable prediction about processes that can be observed and measured (can’t prove a hypothesis). Falsification is a critical component of scientific hypotheses and theories.

o Theory: explanation for a broad range of observations that also generates new hypotheses. It is falsifiable if there can be evidence for it or against it. 

• Pseudoscience: an idea that is presented as science but does not actually utilize basic principles of scientific thinking or procedure ( ex: astrology) 

• Biopsychosocial model: means of explaining behaviour as a product of biological (brain and chemicals), psychological (memories and emotions), and sociocultural factors (family). 

• Massing: studies an individual card 4 times in a row.

• Spacing: studies individual cards 4 times; however, after studying all the cards. So in sequence. This is a better style of learning.

• Scientific literacy: the ability to understand, analyze and apply scientific information.

o Knowledge gathering: what do we know about this?
Scientific explanation: How can science explain it? 

o Critical thinking: Can we critically evaluate the evidence? 

o Application: Why is this relevant? 

• Critical Thinking: Involves exercising curiosity and skepticism when evaluating the claims of others, and without own assumptions and beliefs.

o Be curious

o Examine the nature and source of the evidence; not all research is of equal quality.

o Examine assumptions and biases.

o Avoid overly emotional thinking.

o Tolerate ambiguity. (accept that the complex issues might not have clear-cut answers)

o Consider alternative viewpoints and alternative interpretations of evidence.

• Principle of parsimony: The simplest of all competing explanations of a phenomenon should be the one we accept. 

• Soul is non-physical, spiritual and does not follow physical rules, than science becomes irrelevant; therefore, it wasn't studied. It cannot be given laws like law of gravity. 

• Animism: the idea of attributing soul to an inanimate object

• Psychology is child of two parents (philosophy and biology). 

• Rene Descartes: had social issues; however, smart. He said animals have no souls but are complex biological machinery. He said that screaming animal is not in pain. He said humans are machines, but controlled by a soul (cartesian dualism).

• Empiricism: knowledge comes through sensory experience. 

• John Locke: said humans are completely machine and soul is just illusion. (mind is machine) He believed we were born as blank slate (La Table Rassa) and experience makes a person who he is. He is father of empiricism. 

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• Determinism: belief that all events are governed by lawful, cause-and-effect relationships. Phychological sicnece is both empirical and deterministic.

• Zeitgeist: general set of beliefs of a particular culture at a specific time in history. This prevented psychological science emerging in the 1600s.

• Materialism: the belief that humans and other living beings are composed exclusively of physical matter. James Mills was a materialist.

• Dualism: People began to believe that a part of us is controlled by our soul (we are partly spiritual and partly material)

• Luigi Galvani:

o stimulated frog's leg with muscle. He gave imperial validity for certain psychological clouds

o He proved that we were an electrochemical machine while before Descartes thought we were hydraulic machines 

• Johannes Muller: Doctrine of Specific Nerve energies 

o Measured how fast electrical currents in our brain travel (nerve impulses)

o Did the group of people squeezing hands experiment

• Pierre Florens: Ablation Studies

o He would remove parts of animals brains and see what effect it has on their behaviour

• 

Gustav Fechner and Ernst Weber:

o Psychophysics: which is the study of the relationship between the physical world and the mental representation of that world

o Weight's Experiment led to Weber's Law: 1/10 of a weight difference needed to differentiate between two similar weights

• Johannes Muller: Started to measure the time for nerve impulse

• Pierre Florens: Train animal to do something and remove the part of a brain and than try again if it can do it (Ablation studies). This made people think that animals are like machine like.

• Paul Broca: Experimented on people with problem talking and figured that they all had problem with same part of brain. This led to the thinking that even human brain is machine like.

• Early 1800's is when we started thinking of human bodies as sort of machines.

• Psychology born in germany: In 1800's, during pre-ww1, germany was a super power. It was economically powerful and wanted to stay that way.  So they started putting money in research (if learn new things; new tech; we are better than other country).

• Hermann von Helmholtz: Measuring Speed of Neural Impulses

• Insects have short generations, making them amazing to study for evolution.

• Evolution is the theory of mutation, not creation.

• Herman Von Ebbinghaus : studied memory and found there is a mathematical relationship

Influences on psychology

• From the ancients: philosophical insights into behaviour

o 

Ancient Greeks believed that four humours or fluids flowed throughout the body and influenced both health and personality. These are: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Different combinations of these 4 humours were thought to lead to specific moods and behaviours. This was developed by Hippocrates.

o Galen of Pergamon suggested that the 4 humours combined to created temperaments (emotional and personality characteristic). It included: 

▪ Sanguine (blood): tendency to be impulsive, pleasure-seeking, charismatic.

▪ Choleric (yellow bile): tendency to be ambitious, energetic and aggressive

▪ Melancholic (black bile): tendency to be independent, perfectionistic, and a bit introverted

▪ Phlegmatic (phlegm): tendency to be quiet, relaxed and content with life

• From physics: experimenting with the mind

o Psychophysics: the study of the relationship between the physical world and the mental representation of that world.  (1 pound in right hand and 5 pounds in left hand: what does our brain feel?)

• From evolutionary theory

o Darwin's recognition that behaviours are subject to hereditary influences and natural selection was a major contribution to psychology.

• Medicine

o clinical psychology: field of psychology that concentrated on the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders. It was highly impacted by research on brain localization (the idea that certain parts of brain control specific mental abilities and personality characteristics.

o Localization was studied in two ways:

▪ Phrenology (Franz Gall and Johann Spurzheim): different traits and abilities were distributed across different regions of the brain and if a person possesses certain train, that part of the brain is bumpy.

▪ The study of brain injuries and its affects on behaviours. 

• Paul Broca (Localization of Language): studied patient named Tan who could only say one word: Tan. 

• Karl Wernicke: identified Wernicke's area. Patient with damage there could speak in sentences that sounded normal, but with unusual or made-up words.

• Influence of social sciences: 

o Economics, sociology and anthropology created statistical methods for measuring human traits, which became relevant to psychology. 

o Galton believed that heredity explained psychological differences among people.

o Galton developed ways to measure ability, morality, and achievement (he called it eminence) He was the first person to scientifically take on the question of nature vs nurture relationships. 

o Galton promated that people were born with good genes.

• Hysterical paralysis: a condition in which an individual loses feeling and control in a specific body part.

• Psychoanalysis: psychological approach that attempts to explain how behaviour and personality are influenced by unconscious processes. It was developed by Sigmund Freud.

• Willhelm Wundt: first person to refer to himself as a psychologist and established first laboratory dedicated to studying human behaviour. 

o wrote “The Principles of Physiological Psychology”

o developed technique of introspection: showed humans something and asked what they felt in their brain (some didn't accept it because you had to rely on someone else for them to be true) Structuralist approach

• Edward Titchener: adopted the method of introspection to device an organized map of the structure of human consciousness. His line of research was structuralism.

• William James: brought Darwin's ideas into psychology. He was a functionalist 

• Structuralism: an attempt to analyze conscious experience by breaking it down into basic elements and to understand how these elements work together.

• functionalism: the study of the purpose and function of behaviour and conscious experience. They believe that to understand behavour, one must try to figure out what purpose it may have served over the course of our evolution.

• Big bulldozer (structuralist view because what is like); destructive (functionalist view because what it does). Structuralist: what memory does? Functuionalist: How can it help?

• Behaviourism258: focused on sudying only observable behaviour, with little to no reference to mental events or instincts as possible influences of behaviour. 

• Ivan Pavlov: developed classical conditioning through his studies of salivary reflexes in dogs.

• B.F. Skinner: how an organism responded to rewards and punishments by conducting laboratory studies on animals.

• By mid-20th centuniry, psychology was dominated by behaviourism and Freudian psychoanalytic approaches. Behaviourists: human experience was the product of a lifetime of rewards, punishments and learned associations. Psychoanalysts: huamnexperience was the result of unconscious forces at work deep in the human psyche.

• Sigmund Freud: Scientifically-minded psychologist, hated him because of lack of testable theories. He emphasized how physiological needs and urges relating to survival and reproduction can influence our behaviour. Freud placed great emphasis on how early life experiences influence our behaviour as adults. He thought the mind could affect the body in very direct ways and if there were problems with mind, it could come as disorders. He was anti-science because he came out with ideas that could not be scientifically tested.

o European's reactions: Started field of psychology called Gestalt psychology -An approach emphasizing that psychologists need to focus on the whole perception and experience, rather than its parts (contrasts with structuralist goal of breaking experience into its individual parts). Also “humanistic psychology” was born largely as a direct counter-response to Freud’s which focused on unique aspects of each individual human, each person's freedom to act, and the belief that humans are fundamentally different from other animals.

o North American reaction: wanted to study human behaviour but in a scientific way - behaviorism. Shunned all discussion of any psychological concept that could not be directly and objectively measured and/or manipulated. Psychology became the study of the association between stimuli (any object or situation) and responses (how an organism behaved).

• Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow believed that humans strive to develop a sense of self and are motivated to personally grow and fulfill their potential. 

• Lashley: interested in locating the place in the brain damage affected performance on tasks such as maze navigation. Found that long-term memories are stored through many parts and the size of the damage did have an effect (principle of mass action).

• Hebb's law: demonstrated that memory is actually related to acitivity occuring at the cellular level.

• Bartlett's work demonstrated that we are more likely to remmeber the general storyline than any of the other details, and that our cultural knowledge shapes what elements of a storyline we find important enough to remember. 

• Cognitive psychology: modern psychological perspective that focuses on processes such as memory, thinking, and the language. 

• Social psychology: study of the influence of other people on our behaviour.

• Personality psychology: study of how different personality characteristics can influence how we think and act.

• Kurt Lewin: suggested that behaviour is a function of the individual and the environment.