Daily Opener –List

three topics you will

study in psychology.
Themes in psychology
Psychology is empirical.

 based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience

rather than theory or pure logic.
Daily Opener

 Log in to the class website-

 www.clevelandhistory.weebly.com

 Find your course and click on it.

 What are two benefits of having a class website?

Psychology is theoretically diverse.

 Nature versus nurture debate

Psychology evolved in a sociohistorical
context.
 of, relating to, or involving social history or a combination of social
and historical factors
Behavior is determined by multiple causes.
Our behavior is shaped by our cultural
heritage.
 http://mentalfloss.com/article/67529/24-american-behaviors-
considered-rude-other-countries
Heredity and environment jointly influences
behavior.
Our experience of the world is highly
subjective.
 Subjective - based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or
opinions.
Who is receiving their doctoral degree in
psychology?
Who is receiving their doctoral degree in
psychology?
 2008
 1000 Males
 2300 females
Truth or Fiction
Daily Opener – True or FAlse?

 Psychologists have very little interest in studying people’s emotions.

 A book on psychology, with content similar to that of this textbook,
was written by Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago.
 In the Middle Ages, some innocent people were drowned as a way of
proving that they were not possessed by the devil.
 Some psychologists view our strategies for solving problems as
mental programs operated by our very personal computers – our
brains.
 Sigmund Freud’s theories continue to influence psychology today.
Psychology

 Scientific study of behavior and mental processes

 Behavior

 Cognitive activities
 Behavior – any action that other people can observe

 Cognitive activities – private mental processes

 Dreams, perceptions, thoughts, and memories
 Psychologists, like scientists, seek to
 observe
 describe
 Explain
 Predict
 control events they study
Career options
 Clinical psychologists
 Counseling
 School
 Educational
 Developmental
 Personality
 Social
 experimental
Clinical psychologists

 Evaluate and help people overcome various mental and emotional

problems
 Largest group
 Depression, anxiety and
 Severe psychological disorders – schizophrenia
Schizophrenia

 a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the

relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty
perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from
reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a
sense of mental fragmentation.
Counseling psychologists

 Generally help people with adjustment problems

School

 Help students who have problems that interfere with learning

Educational

 Concerned with theoretical issues that relate to learning,

measurement of abilities, and child and adolescent development.
Developmental

 Study the physical, emotional, cognitive, and social changes that

occur the life span
Personality

 Study the effects of personality traits on behavior

Social

 Look at the influence of social factors on people’s behavior

Experimental

 Conduct research into basic human processes to understand their

effects on behavior
Experimental

 Conduct research into basic human processes to understand their

effects on behavior
Other specialists

 Industrial, organizational
 Environmental
 Consumer
 Forensic
 Health
History

Socrates – Plato – Aristotle

Socrates - ‘know thyself’ –introspection
Suggested that people can learn a lot by examining their own thoughts
and feelings
Introspection – looking within
 Socrates - http://www.biography.com/people/socrates-
9488126/videos/socrates-questioning-philosopher-19747907981

 Plato -

 Aristotle - http://www.biography.com/people/aristotle-
9188415/videos/aristotle-mini-biography-455182915680
Aristotle wrote
Peri Psyches ‘about the mind’
Human behavior, like the movements of the stars and sea, is subject
to certain rules and laws
Bizarre Behavior

 Throughout history, many people have attributed bizarre behavior to

supernatural forces

 What is something more

accurate it could have been attributed to?
Middle Ages 500-1500 AD

 Agitation and confusion were signs

of possession by demons
 Punishment for sins
 Result of deal made with devil

 So, what happened to these people?

Water float test
 Idea that pure metals sink to bottom

 If a person sinks, they are innocent.

 If a person floats, they are guilty and executed.

Greek physician Hippocrates (460-377 BC)

 Suggested that problems were caused by abnormalities in the brain

 It took more than 2,000 years for his idea to gain support.
Birth of modern science

 1500, 1600, 1700

 Moved away from belief in demons and possession
 1500s – Copernicus – challenged the view that the sun revolved
around earth

 1600s-Newton – gravity and motion

 Newton’s book Principia – single most important scientific book ever
published
 1700s- Lavoisier – founded science of chemistry
Daily Opener

Is a clinical psychologist the same thing

as a psychiatrist?
 No.

 A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in the treatment of

psychological problems and who can prescribe medicine.
 This new scientific approach led to the birth of modern psychology in
the 1800s.
Daily Opener

 Who was Wilhem Wundt ?

Wilhem Wundt

 Late 1800s
 Founded structuralism, which sought to discover the basic elements
of conscious experience
 Broke it into 2 parts
 Objective sensations – sight and taste
 Subjective feelings – include emotional responses and mental images
 Mind functions by combining both of these

 Established his lab in Germany

Structuralists believed

 That the human mind functioned by combining these basic elements

of experience.
1 min clip
William James & Functionalism
 James said experience is a fluid and continuous ‘stream of
consciousness’
 Focused on the relationship between experience and behavior
 Published the first modern psychology textbook called, The Principles
of Psychology
 Stream of consciousness writing prompts

 Stream of consciousness-is a writing technique in which a person

writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to
spelling, grammar or topic. It produces raw, often unusable material,
but allows a writer to overcome blocks of apathy and self-criticism. It
is used mainly by prose writers and writing teachers. This technique
is also used by some writers to collect their initial thoughts and ideas
on a topic, and is often used as a preliminary to more formal writing.
Write about your earliest
childhood memory. Recall vivid
senses such as feelings, smells,
sights, sounds….
Functionalism

 William James – 1 of founders

 Concerned with how mental processes help organisms adapt to their
environment
 Stressed application of their findings to everyday situations
 Included introspection but added lab observation
John b Watson

 Founded behaviorism, which maintained that organisms behave in

certain ways because they are reinforced for doing so
 Scientific study of observable behavior
 Thought unscientific to study consciousness
BF Skinner

 Behaviorist
 Reinforcement – reward, repeat
Gestalt School

 Gestalt – shape
 Perceptions are more than sums of parts
 Rather wholes that give shape, or meaning, to the parts
 Believe learning is active and purposeful
Sigmund Freud

 Psychoanalysis –
 Importance of unconscious motives and internal conflicts in determining
human behavior

Meaning of dreams
Freudian slip
Freud
 Id – unconscious, impulsive, only
out for personal pleasure, chaotic,
unreasonable
 Ego – mediates between Id and
reality
 Superego – moral, strive for
perfection, develops around age 4
or 5, parents help create it
Early Schools of thought

 Structuralism
 Functionalism
 Behaviorism
 Gestalt
 Psychoanalysis

 Research assignment –Create a mini presentation to share with the

class.
Psych quiz

1.List three of the early schools of thought with a brief description

including the founder.
Contemporary Psychological Perspectives

 Biological
 Cognitive
 Humanistic
 Pyschoanalytic
 Learning
 Sociocultural

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6sD9333KWA
Read 16-21
Psychology Today

no psychologists today would describe themselves as structuralists or

functionalists.
Few – gestalt
Traditional behaviorists and psychoanalysts also declining

Historical traditions of psychology are expressed in contemporary

psychology.
Biological perspective

 Emphasizes the importance of biological factors in determining

behavior.
 Use CAT and PET scans
 Interested in hormones and chemicals
Cognitive

 Studies mental processes to explain human nature.

Humanistic perspective

Stresses human consciousness, experience, and self-awareness in

helping people make life choices.
Psychoanalytic perspective

 Has roots in Freud’s theories, but psychoanalysts today are less

concerned with unconscious motives and more concerned with
conscious choice and self-direction.
Learning perspective

 Maintains that people learn through experience or by observing

others.
 Biofeedback therapy is a non-drug treatment in which patients learn
to control bodily processes that are normally involuntary, such as
muscle tension, blood pressure, or heart rate.
Sociocultural perspective

 Examines the effects of ethnicity, gender, culture, and socioeconomic

status on human behavior and mental processes.
Daily opener

 Who was Kenneth Clark and what groundbreaking work did he do in

psychology?

 Read the case study on page 27.