PY 101 Exam 1 Study Guide UAB Questions And Answers With Verified Tests 100% Correct Answers

How can psychology be defined? What is the goal? - Psychology goals include describing, explaining, predicting, and control the behavior and mental processes of others. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior How did early philosophers influence what we know today as psychology? - While early philosophers relied on methods such as observation and logic, today's psychologists utilize scientific methodologies to study and draw conclusions about human thought and behavior. psychology's eventual emergence as a scientific discipline. . Empiricism - the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Structuralism/introspection - The personal observation of our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors Functionalism - theory about the nature of mental states. According to functionalism, mental states are identified by what they do rather than by what they are made of. Be able to determine what is experimental and what is correlational research from examples - Correlational research is the observation of two variables to see if there is a relation between them, being positive or negative. Experimental research is the observation between an introduced variable--the independent variable--under controlled environments and its resulting factor--the dependent variable. What is a correlation? - relationship between two variables How can we determine the strength of a correlation? What makes it strong? What makes it weak? - When the r value is closer to +1 or -1, it indicates that there is a stronger linear relationship between the two variables. A correlation of -0.97 is a strong negative correlation while a correlation of 0.10 would be a weak positive correlation.What is a spurious correlation? - an apparent but false relationship between two (or more) variables that is caused by some other variable. example: Drownings rise when ice cream sales rise. It may seem that increased ice cream sales cause more drowning, but in reality, rising heat may cause more people to swim, as well as buy more ice cream. Hypothesis - A testable prediction, often implied by a theory Independent and Dependent variables - independent variable- the experimental factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied. dependent variable- the outcome factor; the variable that may change in response to manipulations of the independent variable. Occam's Razor - Occam's razor is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct. It is applied to a wide range of disciplines, including religion, physics, and medicine. e of the fence posts is broken. Of possible explanations a) An albino moose, lost on its quest for its squirrel best friend, crashed through the fence in despair, or b) An old nail rusted through, "b" is more likely. Clever Hans. Why did it appear that he could do math? - Clever Hans is an orlov trotter horse who was claimed to be able to do math. He discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues. Why is random assignment useful for experimental research? - Random assignment of participants helps to ensure that any differences between and within the groups are not systematic at the outset of the experiment.Populations vs Samples - The main difference between a population and sample has to do with how observations are assigned to the data set. A population includes all of the elements from a set of data. A sample consists one or more observations drawn from the population.