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copyright 2008 Cheryl K. Hosken, BSN, MS Psych.
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Definition of Psychology:
Psychology is the science of human and animal behavior that includes the study of mental processes that influence overt behavior. Psychology is a science like biology, physics, or chemistry. Psychologists use scientific techniques to build a body of knowledge about behavior and mental processes.
Why is animal behavior important? This is because many important discoveries have come from animal research. An example of this is Pavlov's work that led to the discovery of classical conditioning. Skinner's work used pigeons for operant conditioning.
Why not simply pray for people who have psychological problems, or ask them to repent of their sins, or cast out demons from them? Look at how Jesus differentiated between various kinds of problems: In Mark 9:20-29 Jesus recognized that the problem was demon possession. In Luke 5:18-20 Jesus understood that the man was crippled because of his sins, and forgave him. But in John 9:1-7 Jesus recognized that the blind man's problem was neither demon possession nor sin, but a medical problem, and He used physical means to heal this blind man. In this course, we will consider psychology as a field of medicine that deals with psycho-physical problems.
Psychology is interested in behavior, and psychologists study overt behavior. For example, if you were interested in how violent movies contribute to aggression, your focus of study would be the aggressive behavior one sees, not on the feelings the movies give you. The mental processes that underlie overt behavior are also studied in psychology. If you want to study the mental factors that cause aggression, then you want to know what a person is thinking or feeling before the act of aggression. Overt behavior is affected by mental processes.
There are several areas of psychology:
Social - studies the patterns in society that lead to certain behaviors.
Clinical - focuses on the possibility of serious mental illness that could cause behavior, for example, aggression.
Personality - looks for traits shared by persons who might cause violence or aggression.
Developmental - focuses on how a person was reared and in what environment.
Physiological - has an interest in how behavior is influenced by brain structure and hormones.
We find out about the world around us by certain beliefs. Some of these are a matter of faith and fact (the existence of God), some are based on tradition that is passed on from generation to generation. Sometimes beliefs are based on common sense. Some ideas we have about human behavior are based on art, poetry, or drama through the ages. The first goal of psychology is to explore how we perceive ourselves and the world around us from a scientific perspective. The second goal is to discover and understand the forces that influence behavior and mental processes.
Question:
1. Can certain truths learned in psychology be applied to problems in the lives of Christians?
yes /
no.
A psychologist learning about behavior and mental processes avoids the common sense and belief-based approaches and looks for a scientific answer that involves
1) isolating the factors that contribute to behavior and
2) development of theories that account for the behavior.
A theory is a set of assumptions about the causes of behavior and statements and of how the behavior is caused. Theories can be modified, retained, or rejected.
The last goal of psychology is to apply what we find out about behavior and mental processes to help solve real world problems. For example, a physiological psychologist may find that a brain chemical is the cause of severe depression. This may be applied to finding a way to cure or treat depression.
Question:
2. What are the three goals of psychology as mentioned in the lecture?
(Only one of the following answers is correct.)
Analyze our distorted reality, understand why we are dysfunctional, and accept our dysfunctional behavior as normal.
Explore how we perceive ourselves, understand the forces that influence behavior, and apply what we find out about behavior to solve problems.
Undergo pyschotherapy for five years, understand our psychoses and neuroses, and then attend group therapy for ten years.
What qualifies psychology as a science? It has to have an organized body of knowledge and use scientific methods of research. The knowledge base is found in the scientific journals of psychology. A textbook is also one version of a body of knowledge.
Question:
3. What is your attitude about psychology?
The scientific method is a way to acquire knowledge by observing a an event, formulating hypotheses, further observation and experimentation, and refining and retesting the hypothesis. This method is attitude or approach to problem solving and involves a particular way of thinking and processing information.
There are guidelines to the process of scientific study. The psychologist as a scientist, makes observations about behavior he/she sees. For example, he notes that in an emergency situation, if there are a number of people nearby, it is less likely they will help the person in trouble than if there is only one person who sees the emergency situation. On the basis of his observation, the scientist makes a hypothesis. The hypothesis is a tentative explanation of the behavior he saw. Then the hypothesis is tested for support or rejection. A hypothesis is an educated guess, in this context about behavior. The scientist will also read the scientific literature that has been written about his question. By systematically testing the hypothesis through specific and controlled conditions, the scientist can know if his hypothesis is correct or not.
Once the process of research has been done and the hypothesis is correct, the research process does not stop. Instead, there are often more questions related to the hypothesis and cause further research. In this way, knowledge about behavior in psychology is an ongoing process.
Question:
4. What is a hypothesis?
(Only one of the following answers is correct.)
A scientifically proven fact, for example, evolution.
An idea that cannot be proven.
An educated guess, later proven or disproven.
The goal of many psychologists is to use the scientific method to learn more about behavior. There are also scientist-practioners. This means that they are not involved so much in finding new scientific precepts about behavior, but they apply what they already know. For example, a psychologist treating a patient with a psychological disorder might use a new therapy that research has shown to be more effective. They help people deal with problems that affect their behavior in society.
WHERE DID PSYCHOLOGY COME FROM?
Early ideas were that problem behaviors were a curse from God or from gods. Descartes, a French, philospher from 1612-1650, often thought about how the body works and described it as a machine that is subject to natural laws of physics and other sciences. He also realized that the mind interacts with the body in some way by directing it. His doctrine was called mechanism.
Another contributor was John Locke. He was a philosopher in England from 1653-1704. He wanted to know how the mind takes in information about the world and uses it. His theory was that we are born into the world with "empty" minds that gather data about the world from our experience. His doctrine of the mind was called empircism.
Question:
5. Why, in your opinion, were the first professionals to begin thinking about how the mind affects the body philosophers?
In the non-psychological world, Darwin wrote that all species on earth are related to one another. What we know about animals may also help us to understand our own behavior. He emphasized that adaptation to environment was important for different animal species to survive, and that we humans also learn to adapt. Darwin's ideas were written in 1859.
Question:
6. Why was Darwin's contribution to early psychology helpful?
(One or more of the following answers may be correct.)
Our knowledge of animals can help us understand human behavior.
People are simply animals and behave just like other animals.
Man, like other animals, learns to adapt in order to survive.
A German scientist, Gustav Fechner, worked in physics, and studied a physical stimulus and the response of the brain to that stimulus. He thought that if the intensity of a light is increased two-fold, the brain will register seeing twice as much light. But the answer to his hypothesis was negative. His contribution to early psychology was the relationship that the body and brain have to experiences in life.
By the mid-1800s physiologists had discovered that nerves carry electrical messages to and from various parts of the body to make it work. A German scientist, Herman von Helmholtz, did laboratory experiments to determine how long it takes the nervous system to react to a stimulus and how we process information through the five senses.
Question:
7. What is most helpful to you from these early discoveries?
Contributions of early Physiologists
Franz Gall (1758-1828) stated that mental processes have origin in the brain. He also suggested that specific areas of the brain have specific psychological faculties. He also postulated that people have different psychological characteristics that are inborn or genetically produced.
Question:
8. What group of people first began to scientifically explain human behavior?
(Only one of the following answers is correct.)
Physicians.
Physiologists.
Journalists.
Gall then suggested that one could measure a person's psychological capabilities by the size and the bumps on his skull. For example, orators seemed to have large protrusions on the front of the skull. These determinations were called phrenology and were quickly disproven by other researchers.
Question:
9. What is phrenology?
Pierre Flournes (1794-1867) systematically removed small parts of brain from dogs to study each parts function. He found that the lower parts of the brain had specific functions, but was unable to identify the function of the cerebral cortex. He did note that some behaviors were lost with the removal of parts of the cortex. However, he did find that the behavior could be re-aquired by some other part of the cortex.
In 1870, Gustav Fritsch and Edward Hitzig found that if an electric current was run through one side of the brain of a dog, the muscles of the opposite side of its body moved. Hans Berger did the first electroencephalogram that recorded the electrical impulses of the brain. This test is still used today for diagnosis and treatment of seizures and brain injuries.
Question:
10. What part have animals played in the study of psychology through physiology?
(Select the best answer.)
The animals played an active role, volunteering their brains.
Scientists experimented on their brains, by operating and by measuring impulses.
Scientists discovered that certain behavior originates in specific parts of the brain.
Historical Approaches to Psychology
It is claimed that psychology began in 1879 with a German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. He was a student of Hemholtz. His main area of study was in the psychological processes of sensation, perception, attention, and emotions.
Wundt described the structure of the mind and its operations by carefully controlled laboratory experiments. He wanted to break down mental activity into its component parts. His assistants were trained to describe their sensations, thoughts and feelings relating to a particular stimulus. For example, if one of his assistants saw an apple, it would not be enough to say that it is red and round. Instead, the assistant would have to describe the actual sensations his brain had upon seeing the apple. This type of psychology was called STRUCTURALISM.
In America, at the same time, was a professor of psychology named William James. He disagreed with Wundt's approach to psychology of the mind. His thesis was that the consciousness (that is awareness of environment and one's own thoughts) is dynamic, always changing, and continuous. He did not think that psychology should be focused on the structure of the mind, but on its function and how thoughts relate to daily life. James was influenced by Darwin because he wanted to know how the mind functions to help people adapt and survive in the world. This type of psychology was called FUNCTIONALISM.
11. Compare and contrast functionalism and structuralism.
John Watson and B.F. Skinner studied behavior that could be measured overtly. The idea was that behavior of people can be predicted and controlled by studying the relationships between the responses and the conditions under which the responses occur. For example, a rat may turn left in a maze because of certain environmental conditions, not because a rat wants like food or attention. The idea is that environment changes behavior. This type of psychology was called BEHAVIORISM.
Since the late 1800's, there have been other approaches to understanding behavior and mental processes. Some were influential in the past and some continue to influence us today. Here are three of them:
PSYCHOANALYTIC psychology was practiced by Freud in Vienna in the early 1900's. He specialized in treating nervous disorders. Freud based his ideas on his observations of himself and his patients. He believed that our behavior, actions, and thoughts are based on unconscious forces in the mind that we are not aware of. His ideas were perplexing to the behaviorists. His work is viewed as the beginning of clinical psychology.
HUMANISTIC psychology had two founders, Carol Rogers and Abraham Maslow. They thought Freud was wrong in thinking that we are controlled by our basic instincts. They wanted to bring the person into the process of behavior. They thought that if environment and observable responses to stimuli in the environment were studied exclusively, the person himself is left out. In other words, they postulated that such unseen factors as love, concern, hate, and other emotions are real phenomena that a person uses to control his destiny.
Question:
12. What is humanism, in this context?
(Only one of the following answers is correct.)
Something similar to socialism and communism.
Person-centered and process-oriented psychology.
Environment, instincts and stimuli control behavior.
GESTALT psychology was formed by a group of German scientists in the 1900's as well. This approach focuses on how we select and organize information from the outside world. They felt that a person bases his behavior on whole, integrated picture of himself and his environment known as a "GESTALT." There are many gestalts in a personality. In order to improve or change behavior, some of these gestalts must be divided up and parts of them removed from the mind and perception.
While none of these schools of psychology answers the all of the questions of personality and behavior, they have given us insight and various ways to approach persons with problems.
Question:
13. When and where did psychology originate?
Key Principles in Psychology
1. Our biological nature and our physiological nature interact to make us who we are.
2. No two persons are exactly alike.
3. Our experience of the world may reflect something other than what is really happening.
4. For many questions and behaviors in psychology, there are no simple answers.
5. Psychology is relevant to our daily lives.