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Psychology 020

Mike Boisvert

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Course Information

Contact Info:

Email: mjboisve@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?

1. Pretty pervasive parts of being human

2. May provide answers about big questions (e.g. our origins)

3. Helping people

4. 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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Wundt’s 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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Wundt’s 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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Wundt’s 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

• We’ll come back to Freud later

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It’s Not a Purse…It’s 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• Children’s 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