Psyc 111 Comprehensive Notes

Lecture 1/2
■ Important Terms/ People
■ William James
■ First courses
■ First lab

■ G Stanley Hall
■ First phd student
■ APA founder

■ Margaret Floy Washburn
■ First woman to be granted phd

■ Francis Cecil Sumner
■ First african american to receive phd in psych
■ Chair of psych for Howard Univ

■ Biopsychosocial
■ Best way to understand a person
■ Psych+ social+ biological combined

■ Clinical Psychologist
■ Psych disorders
■ How to treat

■ Counseling Psychologist
■ Helping people deal with problems and crisis

■ Community Psychologist
■ Group level
■ Social and physical environment where people can flourish

■ Early Theories
■ Nativism (Plato) Vs. Philosophical Empiricism
■ Native vs nurture
■ Nativism: we are born with all the knowledge needed to
survive in life
■ Philosophical Empiricism: everything that we know we got
through learning. Born a blank slate and we have to
acquire that knowledge

■ Demons
■ In older times, people saw the disordered actions as a result of
demons

, ■ Trephination: drilling holes to release the demon from the head
■
■ Biologic
■ Diff personality characteristics were housed in diff organs of the
body
■
■ John Locke
■ Knowledge and intelligence comes from experiences and
observation

■ Witchcraft
■ Psych disorders were a result of a witch casting a spell in you or
you were a witch
■ More modern than demons
■ Dehumanizing
○

,■ Phrenology
■ Depending on where the bumps and divots were in the skull, it
says diff things about your personality
■ Frans joseph gall

■ Modern Trajectory
■ Weber & Fechner
■ Psychophysics
■ Wanted to understand how we perceived the world around
us
■ Used introspection as their tool

■ Gestalt: German for "Form"
■ The whole is greater than sum of parts
■ When we are perceiving something, we get more out of the
context of the situation, than just the pieces
■ Optical illusions

■ Structuralism
■ First formal school of psych.
■ Wanted to understand consciousness
■ Introspection
■ Wilhelm Wundt
■ Structuralist
■ Father of psych as a science
■ Opened first psych lab
■ 1879
■ First psych lab opened
■ Moved away from philosophy and into science

■ Functionalism
■ Understand how consciousness was used
■ What is the function of consciousness
■ William James
■ Taught first course in psych
■ Wrote first textbook
■ Loved Darwin
■ Played big role in functionalism

■ Freud
■ Bad person
■ Suggestions have not be support with research since
■ Shifting focus of psych from consciousness (structuralism and
functionalism) to unconsciousness

, ■ Believed humans driven by sex and death
■ Hard to test his theories

■ Behaviorism (neglects half the definition of psych)
■ Came due to lack of science in Freud's psych
■ Science isn't science unless you can observe what is happening
■ Took us out of mind into behavior

■ Humanism
■ All humans have the capacity for good
■ Unlike Freud's beliefs

■ Cognitive
■ Invention of computer sparked the question of how humans
processed the world
■ Kurt Lewin
■ Bridge behavioral psych and cognitive psych
■ Look @ behavior and internal
■ Construal of the Stimulus
■ Each person interprets a stimulus differently and
those interpretations guide their behavior

■ Social
■ Study of how we influence others and how others influence us

■ Modern Subfields
■ Evolutionary Psychology
■ Looks for behaviors that helped our ancestors survive that
are still relevant in modern day
■ Attraction and mate selection
■ Aggression

■ Cultural Psychology
■ How a culture can shape its members
■ Difference in groups
■ Lots of collaboration w anthropology

■ Educational Psychology
■ How to optimize learning
■ Teaching ideas
■ Learning disabilities

■ Industrial/ Organizational Psychology (I/O)
■ Work force