General psych
Memory
● Repetition (asking) increases recalling
● Distributed practice: several short study periods leads to better recall than one longer one
● Retrieval practice: helps you remember by quizzing yourself even when it’s unsuccessful
Physiology and Psychophysics
● physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz
○ Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate
○ Explored hearing and vision
○ His work indicated that our senses can deceive us and are not a mirror of the external
world
● Psychophysics
○ → Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those
stimuli.
○ Studied by Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner
History of Psych
● Started with the study of physiology and philosophy
● Empirical research: Research in which we are doing data collection or observing the
world to get info about theory we have
○ Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
○ 150 years old
■ Empirical questions are questions that can be answered with data and
gathered evidence
■ Leads to theory, hypothesis, and data
Empirical research (experiments)
● Wundt
○ Methods are familiar to psych today
○ First psych laboratory
○ His goal was to support the idea of consciousness
● Wundt's methods
○ Introspection: examining internal processes as objectively as possible
■ How am I able to recall? What does it feel like?
○ Reaction times: testing how quickly we react
■ changes how quickly we react to something
■ How fast do we react to light, sound, etc
● STRUCTURALISM: how our minds make meaning and form a consciousness
through small step-by-step cognitive processes
○ Contents of the mind!
● Voluntarism (wundt)
○ Ppl shouldn’t be participating in research unless they know what it’s about
○ CONSENT! THEY MUST KNOW WHAT THE STUDY IS ABOUT
, ● Wunt’s problems
○ We don’t always have ability to be objective internal conflicts
○ Lots of variation from person to person
■ He assumed everyone was same
■ We’re often wrong about our thoughts and memories
○ We can’t introspect accurately about different topics
■ We think we understand, but we are often wrong
● James
○ Functionalism: organisms adapt to world through evolution
■ Thought you couldn't behave behavior in small pieces
■ Believed in studying humans as whole
● Activities of the mind! What the mind does!!
● James McKeen Cattel
○ Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior,
emotion, cognition, and development.
○ Believed that mental abilities like intelligence could be inherited and could be
measured through mental tests
○ saying that a trait is either present or absent does not accurately reflect a person’s
uniqueness, because all of our personalities are actually made up of the same traits;
we differ only in the degree to which each trait is expressed.
○ identified 16 factors or dimensions of personality: warmth, reasoning, emotional
stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity,
vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change,
self-reliance, perfectionism, and tension
■ And made a assessment from these 16 factors
Psych history
● Freud, Sigmund
○ Theory that people could have disorders that aren’t physically caused (internal
like depression)
■ You don’t stub your toe and have depression and freud was first to
acknowledge this
○ Psychoanalytic theory
■ Psychoanalysis: therapy where patient talks about experience and
themselves
■ Pays attention to unconscious and childhood experience
○ Believed many things came down to sexual urges
○ Never had data! So most of his things are unverified
■ Freud was not an empirical!
○ Dream analysis
■ by examinations of the first words that came to people’s minds, and through
seemingly innocent slips of the tongue.
○
,Gestalt psychologist
● studying the whole of any experience was richer than studying individual aspects of that
experience.
○ The saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is a Gestalt perspective
● proposed that the mind often processes information simultaneously rather than afterwards.
○ For instance, when you look at a photograph, you see a whole image, not just a
collection of pixels of color
● Things are not necessarily perceived in the same way for an individual to individual
● Our perception of the world is not universal
● Considers human as whole not separate parts
● Led to the rise of cognitive psychology
Behaviorism
● Behaviorism: The study of behavior.
● Pavlov, Watson, Skinner
○ Pavlov’s study provided support for the notion that learning and behavior were
controlled by events in the environment and could be explained with no reference to
mind or consciousness
■ Pavlov’s salivation in dogs was learned
○ Skinner and positive or negative reinforcement
■ Skinner Box: chamber that isolates the subject from the external environment
and has a behavior indicator such as a lever or a button. When the animal
pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement
of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as a noise).
○
● Concerned only with externally observable behavior
● Conditioning: association of stimulus with response through learning
● No introspection bc didn’t think it was able to be studied
● Frederic C. Bartlett
○ Constructive mind: people use their past experiences to construct frameworks in
which to understand new experiences.
● Roger Brown
○ Research on language and memory
■ Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally
significant event
■ Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The inability to pull a word from memory
even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
Humanism
● Maslow and Rogers
● Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
● Emphasis that all humans have innate potential for good
○ If needs are met, we are able to practice goodness
○ Lower levels met, higher levels are motivation
, ● Humanistic therapy = Client centered therapy
○ Patients takes lead in therapy to work through their own issues
○ Carl rogers
○ Unconditional positive regard
○ Always react positively
○ therapist accepts their client for who they are, no matter what they might say.
○ Very common therapy today
Cognitive revolution
● Pushed psychology to say that there are lot of questions we can’t answer if we only focus
on behavior
● Noam Chomsky
○ Critique child learning language
○ Said behavior principles can’t account for the way children learn first or second
language at school or home or somewhere else
● Brought together ppl who thought in different ways to understand mind
○ Linguistics, neuroscientist, psych, computer scientist (e.g)
Women? POC? Psych today?
● Feminist psychology (20th century)
○ Said white male perspective on studying humans was very white limited
○ Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman awarded the doctoral degree in
psychology.
○ Mary Whiton Calkins completed all requirements toward the PhD in psychology,
but Harvard University refused to award her that degree because she was a
woman.
○ Mary Cover Jones, conducted a study she considered to be a sequel to John B.
Watson’s study of Little Albert
● Multicultural and cross-cultural psych
Memory
● Repetition (asking) increases recalling
● Distributed practice: several short study periods leads to better recall than one longer one
● Retrieval practice: helps you remember by quizzing yourself even when it’s unsuccessful
Physiology and Psychophysics
● physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz
○ Neural impulse: An electro-chemical signal that enables neurons to communicate
○ Explored hearing and vision
○ His work indicated that our senses can deceive us and are not a mirror of the external
world
● Psychophysics
○ → Study of the relationships between physical stimuli and the perception of those
stimuli.
○ Studied by Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner
History of Psych
● Started with the study of physiology and philosophy
● Empirical research: Research in which we are doing data collection or observing the
world to get info about theory we have
○ Empiricism: The belief that knowledge comes from experience.
○ 150 years old
■ Empirical questions are questions that can be answered with data and
gathered evidence
■ Leads to theory, hypothesis, and data
Empirical research (experiments)
● Wundt
○ Methods are familiar to psych today
○ First psych laboratory
○ His goal was to support the idea of consciousness
● Wundt's methods
○ Introspection: examining internal processes as objectively as possible
■ How am I able to recall? What does it feel like?
○ Reaction times: testing how quickly we react
■ changes how quickly we react to something
■ How fast do we react to light, sound, etc
● STRUCTURALISM: how our minds make meaning and form a consciousness
through small step-by-step cognitive processes
○ Contents of the mind!
● Voluntarism (wundt)
○ Ppl shouldn’t be participating in research unless they know what it’s about
○ CONSENT! THEY MUST KNOW WHAT THE STUDY IS ABOUT
, ● Wunt’s problems
○ We don’t always have ability to be objective internal conflicts
○ Lots of variation from person to person
■ He assumed everyone was same
■ We’re often wrong about our thoughts and memories
○ We can’t introspect accurately about different topics
■ We think we understand, but we are often wrong
● James
○ Functionalism: organisms adapt to world through evolution
■ Thought you couldn't behave behavior in small pieces
■ Believed in studying humans as whole
● Activities of the mind! What the mind does!!
● James McKeen Cattel
○ Individual differences: Ways in which people differ in terms of their behavior,
emotion, cognition, and development.
○ Believed that mental abilities like intelligence could be inherited and could be
measured through mental tests
○ saying that a trait is either present or absent does not accurately reflect a person’s
uniqueness, because all of our personalities are actually made up of the same traits;
we differ only in the degree to which each trait is expressed.
○ identified 16 factors or dimensions of personality: warmth, reasoning, emotional
stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity,
vigilance, abstractedness, privateness, apprehension, openness to change,
self-reliance, perfectionism, and tension
■ And made a assessment from these 16 factors
Psych history
● Freud, Sigmund
○ Theory that people could have disorders that aren’t physically caused (internal
like depression)
■ You don’t stub your toe and have depression and freud was first to
acknowledge this
○ Psychoanalytic theory
■ Psychoanalysis: therapy where patient talks about experience and
themselves
■ Pays attention to unconscious and childhood experience
○ Believed many things came down to sexual urges
○ Never had data! So most of his things are unverified
■ Freud was not an empirical!
○ Dream analysis
■ by examinations of the first words that came to people’s minds, and through
seemingly innocent slips of the tongue.
○
,Gestalt psychologist
● studying the whole of any experience was richer than studying individual aspects of that
experience.
○ The saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is a Gestalt perspective
● proposed that the mind often processes information simultaneously rather than afterwards.
○ For instance, when you look at a photograph, you see a whole image, not just a
collection of pixels of color
● Things are not necessarily perceived in the same way for an individual to individual
● Our perception of the world is not universal
● Considers human as whole not separate parts
● Led to the rise of cognitive psychology
Behaviorism
● Behaviorism: The study of behavior.
● Pavlov, Watson, Skinner
○ Pavlov’s study provided support for the notion that learning and behavior were
controlled by events in the environment and could be explained with no reference to
mind or consciousness
■ Pavlov’s salivation in dogs was learned
○ Skinner and positive or negative reinforcement
■ Skinner Box: chamber that isolates the subject from the external environment
and has a behavior indicator such as a lever or a button. When the animal
pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement
of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as a noise).
○
● Concerned only with externally observable behavior
● Conditioning: association of stimulus with response through learning
● No introspection bc didn’t think it was able to be studied
● Frederic C. Bartlett
○ Constructive mind: people use their past experiences to construct frameworks in
which to understand new experiences.
● Roger Brown
○ Research on language and memory
■ Flashbulb memory: A highly detailed and vivid memory of an emotionally
significant event
■ Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: The inability to pull a word from memory
even though there is the sensation that that word is available.
Humanism
● Maslow and Rogers
● Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
● Emphasis that all humans have innate potential for good
○ If needs are met, we are able to practice goodness
○ Lower levels met, higher levels are motivation
, ● Humanistic therapy = Client centered therapy
○ Patients takes lead in therapy to work through their own issues
○ Carl rogers
○ Unconditional positive regard
○ Always react positively
○ therapist accepts their client for who they are, no matter what they might say.
○ Very common therapy today
Cognitive revolution
● Pushed psychology to say that there are lot of questions we can’t answer if we only focus
on behavior
● Noam Chomsky
○ Critique child learning language
○ Said behavior principles can’t account for the way children learn first or second
language at school or home or somewhere else
● Brought together ppl who thought in different ways to understand mind
○ Linguistics, neuroscientist, psych, computer scientist (e.g)
Women? POC? Psych today?
● Feminist psychology (20th century)
○ Said white male perspective on studying humans was very white limited
○ Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman awarded the doctoral degree in
psychology.
○ Mary Whiton Calkins completed all requirements toward the PhD in psychology,
but Harvard University refused to award her that degree because she was a
woman.
○ Mary Cover Jones, conducted a study she considered to be a sequel to John B.
Watson’s study of Little Albert
● Multicultural and cross-cultural psych
