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Chapter1-IntroducingPsychology.pptxIntroducing Psychology –Chapter 1
Dr. Ghada Shahrour
What is Psychology?
The word “psychology” comes from the Greek words
.“psyche,” meaning life, and “logos,” meaning explanation
Broadly speaking, psychology as a science is defined as the scientific study of mind and behavior
Defining Psychology
Therefore, psychology as a science deals systemically with human behavior, motives, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and actions of human beings
Like other sciences, psychology aims at understanding, explaining, predicting, and thus modifying human behavior. Psychologists reach these aims objectively using the scientific method. The scientific method is the process of observing, asking questions, and seeking answers through tests and experiments.
Psychology
Psychologists use the scientific method to conduct their research. The scientific method is a standardized way of making observations, gathering data, forming and testing hypothesis and interpreting results.
Example:
All tall men are intelligent
All green-eyed people are happy
The evolution of Psychology
The earliest psychologists that we know about are the Greek philosophers Plato (428-347 BC) and Aristotle
(384-322 BC).
These philosophers asked many of the same questions that today’s psychologists ask; for instance, they questioned the distinction between nature and nurture and the existence of free will.
Early Psychologists
Plato argued on the nature side, believing that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn, whereas Aristotle was more on the nurture side, believing that each child is born as an “empty slate” and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience
Early Psychologists
French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) also considered the issue of free will, arguing in its favor and believing that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland in the brain (an idea that made some sense at the time but was later proved incorrect).
A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and was among the first to understand that the nerves controlled the muscles. He also addressed the relationship between mind (the mental aspects of life) and body (the physical aspects of life).
Descartes believed in the principle of dualism: that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body.
Early Psychologist
The fundamental problem that these philosophers faced was that they had few methods for testing their claims. Most philosophers didn’t conduct any research on these questions, in part because they didn’t yet know how to do it, and in part because they weren’t sure it was even possible to objectively study human experience.
Structuralism
German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt(1832-1920) began the field known as structuralism, a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of
psychological experience
Structuralists used the method of introspection
to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness
Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks, such as viewing colors, reading a page in a book, or performing a math problem.
Structuralism
An important aspect of the structuralist approach was that it was rigorous and scientific. The research marked the beginning of psychology as a science, because it demonstrated that mental events could be quantified.
Example: the experiment of recognizing the sound and naming it
- But the structuralists also discovered the limitations of introspection. Even highly trained research participants were often unable to report on their subjective experiences..
Functionalism
Pioneered by the American psychologist William James (1842-1910).
William James and the other members of the school of functionalism aimed to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess. For James, one’s thinking was relevant only to one’s behavior.
Functionalism
Functionalists were influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) theory of natural selection, which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful, or functional. The functionalists believed that Darwin’s theory applied to psychological characteristics too. Just as some animals have developed strong muscles to allow them to run fast, the human brain, so functionalists thought, must have adapted to serve a particular function in human experience.
Functionalism
The work of the functionalists has developed into the field of evolutionary psychology, a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior.
Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions.
Psychodynamic Psychology
- Pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers
- It is an approach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.
Freud developed his theories about behavior through extensive analysis of the patients that he treated in his private clinical practice. Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced, including anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that they could no longer remember.
Freud developed the psychoanalysis therapy which depends on
Dream analysis and talk therapy to get to the unconscious experience
And thus resolve patient’s psychological problems.
Psychodynamic Psychology
Psychodynamic therapy emerged from the psychoanalysis therapy. It share with psychoanalysis common themes including:
1- the importance of unconscious in human behavior
2- the idea that early childhood experiences are critical, and the concept of therapy as a way of improving human lives
Behaviorism
- Pioneered by Ivan Pavlov and Skinner
-Behaviorism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself.
- behaviorists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviors.
Behavior has two components:
A stimulus response
The Cognitive Approach
Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment.
Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply.
Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy.
Social-Cultural Psychology
The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior.
Social-cultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence each other’s behavior
Social-Cultural Psychology
Concepts related to social-cultural psychology include:
- conformity: the frequently of changing our beliefs and behaviors to be similar to those of the people we care about.
- Social norms: the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate. Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group.
- culture: the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region
