CHAPTER OUTLINE

CHAPTER OUTLINE

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology Defined

Psychology is the science of understanding people. Formally, it is the scientific study of thought and behavior.
How does psychology differ from other fields that attempt to understand human behavior?

Literature tries to understand people through story, character exploration, place, and word artistry.
History tries to understand people by describing and analyzing past events.
Sociology studies people by looking at large-scale social forces and focuses on groups rather than individuals.

Is psychology a science?

Yes! It is not just couches and analyzing “crazy” people. Psychology is often a social science but increasingly it is also a biological science.
Moreover, not only is it a science, in an analysis of all of the scientific disciplines, it emerged as one of the few core sciences around which other sciences revolve. The other core sciences were medicine, earth science, chemistry, physics, and math (Boyack, Klavans, & Börner, 2005).

One aspect of psychology that makes it unique among the sciences is the fact that the subject and the object of the work are the same. It’s humans studying how humans think and behave (the exception being animal studies).

Why Should You Study Psychology?

Psychology is considered a part of a good general education, because its content is useful to many fields. Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and motives of others and yourself is helpful for any academic discipline.
From our first days, humans have been inherently interested in other humans for survival purposes.

Subdisciplines of Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of how we perceive, how we learn and remember, how we learn and use language, and how we solve problems.

Those who do research on cognition and learning are often referred to as experimental psychologists, because they conduct laboratory experiments to address their research questions.

Developmental psychology explores how thought and behavior change and show stability across the life span.
Behavioral neuroscience studies the links among brain, mind, and behavior. Neuroscience is an area that cuts across various disciplines and subdisciplines of psychology. That is, one can study brain functions involved in learning, emotion, social behavior, and mental illness, to name just a few areas.

A related subdiscipline, biological psychology, examines the relationship between bodily systems and chemicals and their influence on behavior and thought.

Health psychologists examine the role of psychological factors in physical health and illness.
Nature-Nurture Pointer: What is going on in our minds can make us more or less susceptible to illness. This connection between nature and nurture is a powerful one.
Personality psychology considers what makes people unique as well as the consistencies in people’s behavior across time and situations.
Social psychology considers how the real or imagined presence of others influences thought, feeling, and behavior.

CONNECTION: Why do crowds inhibit helping behavior? Research on the bystander effect focuses on this question.

Clinical psychology focuses on the treatment of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and ways to promote psychological health. This is the single largest subdiscipline in psychology.

A related field is counseling psychology. Counseling psychologists are more likely than clinical psychologists to work with less severe psychological disorders.
Psychiatrists have training in medicine and an MD degree. In addition to offering psychotherapy, they can also prescribe drugs.

Educational psychology examines how students learn, the effectiveness of particular teaching techniques, the dynamics of school populations, and the psychology of teaching. It also attempts to understand special populations of students, such as the academically gifted and the learning disabled.

School psychology is a related field that is generally practiced by counselors in school settings.

Industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology applies to a broad array of psychological concepts and questions to work settings and problems. I/O is one of the fastest growing subdisciplines in psychology.
Sports psychology examines the psychological factors in sports and exercise (Weinberg & Gould, 1999).
Forensic psychology is a blend of psychology, law, and criminal justice (Adler, 2004).

THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGY

This section looks at the two main forms of psychology: clinical practice and science.

A Brief History of the Practice of Clinical Psychology

Prehistoric Views

Most prehistoric cultures had medicine men or women known as shamans, who treated “possession” by driving out the demons with rituals such as exorcisms, incantations, and prayers.
Some shamans used trephination – the drilling of a small hole in the person’s skull to release the spirits and demons that possessed the afflicted person.

Ancient Views

Egypt and Greece were the first cultures to focus on natural and physical explanations for disorders.

Hippocrates was the first to write about acrophobia – the fear of heights.

At this same time, the Chinese were focusing on natural and bodily explanations of psychological disorders (e.g., they made connections between a person’s bodily organs and his emotions).

Medieval to Early Modern Views

During the Middle Ages people were again diagnosed as being possessed, as opposed to having an physical disorder. Remember, this is the era of witches!

How did they test to see if a person was a witch? One popular method was the float test, in which a person’s hands and feet were tied and she was thrown into a lake or river. If she floated, she had to be guilty because only the Devil could make someone float; if she sank, she was innocent.

It was during the 16^th century witch-hunts that the first facilities for the mentally ill were created. Called asylums, these facilities were really nothing more than warehouses for the socially undesirable.
In response to the horrible conditions of the asylums, moral treatment movements began. The main idea was to provide a relaxing place where these patients would be treated with dignity and care.

Modern Views

The first modern views of psychological disorders viewed them as any other form of illness – things to be diagnosed and treated with the proper therapy.
Emil Kraepelin began a systematic method of classifying and diagnosing psychological disorders. He identified “dementia praecox” (premature dementia), later changed to “schizophrenia,” and was the first to distinguish thought disorders from the mood disorders.
Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis, a clinically based approach to understanding and treating psychological disorders. This perspective focused on the unconscious and early childhood experiences in adult psychological disorders.
By the middle of the 20^th century, three of the major modern developments in clinical psychology had emerged: modern diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, psychotherapy, and drug therapy. Chapters 15 and 16 will cover these issues in depth.
Today, psychologists use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4^th edition, Text Revision (DMS-IV-TR) to diagnose psychological disorders. In fact, this standardized manual diagnoses more than 250 psychological disorders.

A Brief History of Scientific Psychology

There are two parent disciplines of scientific psychology: philosophy and physiology.

The Philosophy of Empiricism

John Locke established empiricism – the view that knowledge and thoughts come from experience. Locke believed that the mind begins as a blank slate (tabula rasa), and that experience (what one sees, hears, tastes, touches, and smells) establishes its contents.
Philosophy is not held to the scientific requirements of psychology – that is, it doesn’t need to collect data. It was not until around 1970 that the first psychological laboratory was opened in Germany.

The Psychophysics of Human Perception

The first researchers in psychological science studied psychophysics – the subjective experience of physical sensations. They presumed that if the mind consists only of what we sense, then understanding the senses would lead to a direct understanding of the mind.
One important principle of psychophysics is that perception of physical properties is not the same as the physical properties themselves.
Ernst Weber, Gustav Fechner, and Hermann von Helmholtz were among the first experimental psychologists. Their research will be examined in Chapter 4..
CONNECTIONS: Helmholtz’s work laid the foundation for several areas of psychology, including neuroscience (Chapter 3), sensation and perception (Chapter 4), and memory (Chapter 7).
In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt set up his psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. This is considered the birthplace of experimental psychology.
William James, who worked at Harvard University, is considered the founder of psychology in the United States.
G. Stanley Hall studied with both Wundt and James. He earned the first PhD in psychology as James’ student. Hall also opened the first U.S. laboratory of psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore thereby establishing psychology as a science in the United States. He founded the American Psychological Association (APA) and become its first president in 1892.
Francis Cecil Sumner, a student of Hall’s, was the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology (1920).
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930), another of James’s students, became the first female president of the APA in 1905.

Structuralism-Functionalism

The primary question here is whether it is more important to study the elements of experience in order to understand human thought and behavior, or to study the functions behind human thought and behavior.
Structuralists believe that breaking down experience into its elemental parts provides the best way to understand thought and behavior.

To do this, they used introspection – looking into one’s own mind for information about the nature of conscious experience.

Functionalists, who also used introspection, felt it was better to look at why the mind worked the way it did, rather than to describe its parts.

Behaviorism

Founded by John Watson, behaviorism proposes that psychology can be a true science only if it examines observable behavior, not ideas, thoughts, feelings, or motives.
Skinner modified Watson’s ideas and argued that rewards and reinforcement shape behavior.
CONNECTION: Watson, Skinner, and behaviorism had tremendous influence on the psychology of learning (Chapter 7).
Behaviorism is an extreme form of environmentalism in which Locke’s idea of tabula rasa is most clearly expressed.

Humanistic and Positive Psychology

Humanistic psychology focuses on personal growth and meaning as a way of reaching one’s highest potential.
Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers founded this movement, but their popularity waned in the 1970s.
Martin Seligman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi started the movement called positive psychology in the 1990s. It shares with humanism a belief that psychology should focus on studying, understanding, and promoting healthy and positive psychological functioning with more of a scientific focus.
CONNECTION: Humanistic personality psychologists developed theories of personality based on humans at their best and striving to be better (Chapter 13).

Cognitivism

Although behaviorism moved away from internal motives and thoughts as being important scientific concepts, two events kept them in the minds of psychologists:

Gestalt psychology, developed by Max Wertheimer, proposed that we perceive things as wholes rather than a compilation of parts. Moreover, our brains actively shape sensory information into perceptions.
Second, mental processes returned to psychology at full force in the 1950s and 1960s – right at the peak influence of behaviorism. Now, though, the term cognition appeared to discuss thoughts and mental processes.

Cognitive science used the computer as a metaphor for the mind. Computers store, retrieve, and process information, just as the brain stores, retrieves, and processes sensations, memories, and ideas. Sensation was the input; perception was the interpretation and processing of the input; and behavior and thoughts were the output.
By the 1980s, cognitive science combined many disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience.

Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience

By the 1980s, psychologists were becoming receptive to the ideas that who we are, how we got here, and what we do and think are very much a result of brain activity, are influenced by genetic factors, and have a long evolutionary past. This movement was encouraged by developments in the fields of behavioral neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and the emergence of evolutionary psychology.
CONNECTION: Our genetic code is not set at birth. Genes are turned on or off by experiences we have, foods we eat, and even foods our mothers ate while pregnant with us (Chapter 3).

WAYS OF THIKING ABOUT MIND, BODY, AND EXPERIENCE

The Nature-Nurture Debate

· This debate is over whether innate biology or life experience determines our personality and behaviors.

· The nature-only view is that who we are comes from inborn tendency and genetically based traits.

· The nurture-only side states that we are all born essentially the same, and we are a product of our experiences. Again, Locke would support this idea.

o This notion is very North American in nature.

· Rather than pit nature against nurture, this book supports the notion of nature through nurture: The environment – be it the womb or the home – constantly interacts with biology to shape who we are and what we do (Begley, 2007; Ridley, 2003).

· Nature-Nurture Pointer: The environment and biological events, such as when genes get expressed and the formation of synapses, mutually influence each other.

Mind-Body Dualism

· This debate is over how much separation there is between our mind and our body. From this perspective, the mind controls the body. The body can occasionally control the mind too, but mainly when we lose our better judgment, such as in the throes of passion. Mostly, mind and body are separate.

· This dualism, or separation of mind and body, allows for the idea of a soul that survives bodily death. This allows for ideas of reincarnation and resurrection.

The Evolution of Behavior

· Evolution is the change over time in the frequency with which specific genes occur within a breeding species.

· Charles Darwin was the first to discuss a major principle at play in evolution – natural selection. This is formally defined as a feedback process whereby nature favors one design over another, depending on whether it has an impact on reproduction.

o Every once in a while, genes change for no apparent reason. These are called chance mutations. Mutations can cause variation in the design of a structure or a set of behaviors.

o The key for natural selection to work is that the behaviors have to increase reproductive success, because reproduction and the passing of genes drive the whole process.

o The accumulation of chance mutations underlies evolutionary change.

o Natural selection creates structures and behaviors that solve adaptive problems. Adaptations are inherited solutions to ancestral problems that have been naturally selected because they directly contribute in some way to reproductive success, and they continue to perform that function (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).

· Evolutionary psychology is the branch of psychology that is about understanding the functions of the human mind rather than just describing what it does.

o Students can imagine they are driving on the highway and the car in the lane next to them has just cut them off. They slam on the brakes to avoid the accident. They experience fear and they do so because fear has been naturally selected because it helps us deal with problems. It moves us into action so we can protect ourselves.

o Structure/features that perform a function that did not arise through natural selection are called by-products or exaptations. For example, humans didn’t evolve to speak in fully grammatical sentences but once they started doing so, there were legitimate adaptive reasons to continue.

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Making Connections in Psychology

· See separate section for detailed explanation.

KEY TERMS

adaptations: inherited solutions to ancestral problems that have been selected for because they directly contribute in some way to reproductive success; they continue to perform that function though the problem that required the adaptation no longer exists.

asylums: facilities for treating the mentally ill that existed in Europe during the Middle Ages and into the 19^th century.

behavioral neuroscience: the study of the links among brain, mind, and behavior.

behaviorism: a school of psychology that proposed that psychology can be a true science only if it examines observable behavior, not ideas, thoughts, feelings, or motives.

biological psychology: the study of the relationship between bodily systems and chemicals, and how they influence behavior and thought.

clinical psychology: the field that deals with the treatment of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and the promotion of psychological health.

cognitive psychology: the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.

cognitive science: a theory of psychology discipline that focuses on the scientific study of human thought.

developmental psychology: the study of how thought and behavior change and remain stable across the life span.

educational psychology: the study of how students learn, the effectiveness of particular teaching techniques, the social psychology of schools, and the psychology of teaching.

empiricism: the view that all knowledge and thoughts come from experience.

evolution: the change over time in the frequency with which specific genes occur within a breeding species.

evolutionary psychology: the branch of psychology that aims to understand the functions of the human mind by looking at and understanding what adaptive problems it may have solved earlier in its ancestral past.

forensic psychology: the study that combines psychology and the legal and criminal justice systems.

functionalists: a school of psychology that argued that it was better to look at why the mind worked the way it did than to describe its parts.

Gestalt psychology: a theory of psychology that proposes that we perceive things as wholes rather than a compilation of parts.

health psychologists: scientists who examine the role that psychological factors play in regard to physical health and illness.

humanistic psychology: a theory of psychology that focuses on personal growth and meaning as a way of reaching one’s highest potential.

industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology: the application of psychological concepts and questions to work settings and problems.

introspection: the main method of investigation for structuralists; it involves looking into one’s own mind for information about the nature of conscious experience.

moral treatment: approach to treatment of the mentally ill that began in Europe during the 18^th and 19^th centuries; its goal was to offer dignity and care in a relaxing environment.

natural selection: a feedback process whereby nature favors one design over another, depending on whether it has an impact on reproduction.

nature through nurture: the position that the environment—be it the womb or the home or the entire world—constantly interacts with biology to shape who we are and what we do.

personality psychology: the study of what makes people unique and the consistencies in people’s behavior across time and situations.

positive psychology: a theory of psychology that shares with humanism a belief that psychology should focus on studying, understanding, and promoting healthy and positive psychological functioning, but does so from a scientific rather than theoretical perspective.

psychoanalysis: a clinically based approach to understanding and treating psychological disorders; assumes that the unconscious mind is the most powerful force behind thought and behavior.

psychology: the scientific study of thought and behavior.

psychophysics: the first scientific form of psychology; laboratory studies of the subjective experience of physical sensations.

shamans: medicine men or women who treat the possessed by coaxing and driving out the demons with elaborate rituals, such as exorcisms, incantations, and prayers.

social psychology: the study of how living among others influences thought, feeling, and behavior.

sports psychology: the study of psychological factors in sports and exercise.

structuralism: 19th-century school of psychology that argued that breaking down experience into its elemental parts offers the best way to understand thought and behavior.

MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

Subdisciplines of Psychology

CONNECTION: Why do crowds inhibit helping behavior? Research on the bystander effect focuses on this question. This issue is outlined in detail in Chapter 14.

Discussion: Have students recall experiences in First Aid or Health classes they have taken in which they learn CPR. They walk up to Rescue Annie (the doll they resuscitate) and the first thing they ask her is “Are you all right? Are you OK? YOU call 911.” And as they say that last sentence they have to point to one person in the crowd. Why? Because you must allocate responsibility; otherwise people just stand around as if silently asking, “who, me?”

A Brief History of Scientific Psychology

CONNECTION: Helmholtz’s work laid the foundation for several areas of psychology, including neuroscience, sensation and perception, and memory. These issues are discussed in Chapters 3, 4, and 7, respectively.

Discussion: Hemholtz made important contributions to the study of memory, physiology, and color vision, but also made seminal contributions to the laws of conservation in physics, music theory, meteorology, and geometry, and designed a workable telephone years before Alexander Graham Bell (Benjamin, 2007). Ask students to discuss how this is related to psychology. For example, discuss how they can have a conversation with their roommate about choirs. The words sensed by the ears are the same for both people but the perceptions of the conversation could be quite different.

CONNECTION: Watson, Skinner, and behaviorism had tremendous influence on the psychology of learning (Chapter 8).

Discussion: How we learn is of huge interest to psychologists. How might behaviorists and psychoanalysts differ in their perceptions of learning?

CONNECTION: Humanistic personality psychologists developed theories of personality based on humans at their best and striving to be better (Chapter 13).

Discussion: Ask students if they think this is a valid personality theory. That is, based on their experiences, do they think people strive to be the best they can be? Who does? Who doesn’t?
Discussion: Humanistic psychology was faulted for its lack of scientific rigor. How could these concepts be tested?

CONNECTION: Our genetic code is not set at birth. Genes are turned on or off by experiences we have, foods we eat, and even foods our mothers ate while pregnant with us (Chapter 3).

Discussion: This combination of nature and nurture influencing development has been of huge importance in psychology. Which influences us more? Ask students for their thoughts.

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Making Connections in Psychology

CONNECTION: Can a person actually become addicted to online activities? What does it mean to be addicted to electronic interaction (Chapter 16)?

Activity: Using the CPS clicker, ask students how many hours they spend online. Then ask them how they spend that time. What sites do they visit? Why are they online? Ask if they think they are addicted to the Internet.

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Making Connections in Psychology

How do psychologists from different subfields study electronic communication (such as e-mail, blogs, cell phones, texting, instant messaging, etc.) and human behavior and thought?

Behavioral Neuroscience

Researchers in this area would likely ask questions such as: Does the brain respond in the same way to electronic interactions as it does with face-to-face interactions? If it responds differently, what other brain region might be activated?
Brain imaging research usually requires participants to be lying down in a scanning machine that holds the head perfectly still. For this reason, it is difficult to get brain images of people on the internet or using cell phones. But these activities can be simulated while in a scanner and will no doubt be studied by behavioral neuroscientists.

Cognitive Psychology

· Cell phone use has sparked a number of research questions – especially with regard to driving. Thus far, researchers have reported that the person’s driving ability is similar to a person’s driving ability while drunk (Strayer et al., 2006).

Developmental Psychology

· Developmental psychologists are interested in questions such as: At what age is a person too young to form electronic social networks? At what age does usage of internet social networks peak? Will they always be for the younger generation? Will people 60 and older use them? Does gender affect interest and participation in SNSs? How have cell phones and other electronic methods of communicating changed how teenagers interact with each other?

· Research has reported tentatively that older teenage girls and young women are more likely to participate in social networking sites than boys and young men (Boyd, 2007; Hargittai, 2008).

· Electronic interactions are popular with adolescents due to psychological factors such as identity, autonomy, intimacy, and sexuality (Subrahmanyam & Greenfield, 2008).

Social Psychology

One of the first applications of the internet for social purposes was online dating services. This type of electronic interaction may work best for those who suffer from social anxiety (Stevens & Morris, 2007).
Electronic interactions cannot easily be used to hide one’s “real personality” and to avoid ever having real face-to-face contact with others (Couch & Liamputtong, 2008).
Being privately public means connecting with many other people, while being relatively non-public about sharing information about who you are. You disclose a lot of details of your private life and may or may not limit access to your site (Lange, 2008).
Another electronic behavior is the concept of “friending.” If someone allows you access to their site, they have “friended” you. This in turn leads to ancient issues of being “popular,” socially excluded, rejected, and accepted.

Personality Psychology

These psychologists may ask: Are people who interact extensively with other people via Facebook more or less extraverted than those who do not? Whose tube is YouTube, anyway (Hargittai, 2008)? Moreover, how much of one’s personality is reflected in the style of their websites and Facebook pages?
When the impressions formed from websites are compared to self-reported personality data, the web-based personality evaluations are fairly accurate but the accuracy depended on which personality trait was being rated (Vazire & Gosling, 2004).
There is also the psychologically very interesting phenomenon of creating your alternative personality or avatar in the gaming world. People sometimes take on personalities that are very different from their own in an online world which allows them to express and say things they would not in direct face-to-face contact. And yet, there is some evidence that it is very difficult to shed completely one’s offline personality when being an online personality (Smith & Kollock, 1999).

Health Psychology

A very innovative and at least partially successful application of electronic media is using the cell phone to post health information and symptoms of various diseases. This type of communication erases the embarrassment of having to obtain a health diagnosis face-to-face.

Clinical Psychology

· One of the main criteria for a mental illness is when it interferes with everyday life and functioning. If one is online for 10-12 hours a day, is that healthy? What about the danger involved in meeting someone in person who you only know from online interaction? Sexual predators are known to use these connections to obtain victims. Sexual predators, in fact, contact potential victims through chat rooms, instant messages, and email. In one study, one in five teens (ages 10-17 years) had been sexually solicited online (Mitchell, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2001). Social learning probably offers the best explanation as to how smoking behavior is acquired. Most smokers start smoking as teenagers, and most teens start smoking because they seek some of the rewards that appear to come with smoking: coolness, peer acceptance, looking like an adult. Kids see that others who smoke get some of these rewards for smoking. Thus they might model the smoking behavior in order to obtain these rewards themselves.

· CONNECTION: Can a person actually become addicted to online activities? What does it mean to be addicted to electronic interaction (Chapter 16)?