Psychology%20020%20Mike%20Boisvert

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Psychology 020Mike Boisvert
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Course Information

• Contact Info
• Email mjboisve_at_uwo.ca
• Office hours by appointment
• Evaluations
• 4 multiple-choice exams (each 2-hr)
• Thought paper

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Thought Paper

• News reports of published research
• Ask Patty type articles
• Reports of health campaigns
• etc..
• What are your thoughts on this article?
• Did the article ignore important details from the
  study it quotes?
• Does the article raise an important issue? Why
  do you think it is an important issue?

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Course Objectives

• Understand historical roots of Psychology
• Understand scientific method/research methods
  used by psychologists
• Understand major theoretical perspectives within
  Psychology
• Understand principles, theories, findings of
  subfields of Psychology
• Be able to critically evaluate information
  presented in popular media about Psychology

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What is Psychology?

• Clinical
• Counseling
• Cognitive
• Developmental
• Social
• Educational
• Personality
• Organizational
• And many, many more

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The Common Elements?

• Behavior and thought
• Psychology is the scientific study of behavior
  and the mind

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What Psychology is Not

• Psychics
• ESP
• Sitting in a leather chair and thinking
• Those people that you see on Oprah

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Why Psychology?

• Why study behavior and the mind?
• Pretty pervasive parts of being human
• May provide answers about big questions (e.g. our
  origins)
• Helping people
• Informs other fields too (medicine, biology,
  marketing, etc.)

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Where did Psychology come from?

• Physiology, philosophy, and biology got freaky
  and out came PSYCHOLOGY
• Psychology emerged in the 19th century once folks
  accepted the idea that behavior and the mind
  could be studied scientifically

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Those Nutty Philosophers

• Rene Decartes (1596-1650)
• We are machines with a soul
• Mind and body as separate
• Animals have no soul

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Those Nutty Philosophers

• British Empiricists
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
• Contents of mind rest on experience
• John Locke (1632-1704)
• white paper or tabula rasa

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Those Nutty Physiologists

• Sechenov and Pavlov
• Role of reflexes
• Flourens and Broca
• Localization of function

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Those Nutty Biologists

• Charles Darwin
• Possible to explain origins of humanity without
  requiring religion
• On the Origin of Species, 1859
• Part-time bass player for ZZ Top

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Those Nutty Psychologists

• Die ersten Psychologen waren deutsch
• Wilhelm Wundt
• Opened first psych lab at U of Leipzig (1879)
• Simple experiments to study sensations, memories,
  judgments

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Wundts Experiments

• This is an analog of one of his experiments..
• Instructions
• Phase 1
• Place the palm of your left hand on your desk
• When you see a colored shape lift your hand off
  your desk and raise it above your head
• Do this as quickly as you can

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Reaction time 0.20 sec
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Wundts Experiments

• OK, that was the easy task
• Instructions
• Phase 2
• Place both hands on your desk
• If the circle is red raise your left hand, but if
  it is green raise your right hand
• Do this as quickly as you can

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Reaction time (RT) 0.29 sec
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Wundts Experiments

• RT(phase 2) RT(phase1) time required to
  perform mental events
• Mental events were the judgment about color and
  the response decision
• RTphase 1 0.20 s RTphase2 0.29
  s
• Time required for categorization/decision 0.09 s

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Also in Europe

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Psychoanalysis
• Unconscious mental conflicts
• Well come back to Freud later

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Its Not a PurseIts European

• Ethology
• Lorenz, Tinbergen, von Frisch
• Naturalistic studies of animals
• Innate behaviors

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Meanwhile in the USA

• Behaviorism
• Reaction against introspection
• John B. Watson (1878-1958)
• Mind is bogus concept
• Role of environment
• Expanding animal research
• From 1920s on behaviorism became dominant
  tradition in psychology

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Behaviorism

• B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
• Radical behaviorist
• Developed new apparatus for testing animal
  behavior, Skinner box
• These things are still commonly used to study
  animal behavior

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Cognitive Psychology

• Behaviorism began to wane in the 1960s
• Factors
• Increasing focus on biological basis of behavior
• Rise of computers new analogy for the brain
• Hardware physical machinery of brain
• Software steps involved in acquiring,
  processing, storing input

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You say you want a revolution?

• Prominent figures in the early cognitive
  revolution
• Jean Piaget
• Childrens reasoning abilities
• Kids pass through mental stages in which
  reasoning becomes more advanced
• Noam Chomsky
• Language as a system of mental rules
• Rules based on innate capacities of mind