AP Psych

The story of Psychology:

Harvard astronomer, Owen GIngerich says that there is nothing more awe
inspiring and absorbing than our own brain. It is the most complex
physical object known to us in the entire cosmos.
What is psychology?
Plato was a nativist, claiming that a persons character and intelligence,
and certain ideas were inherited from the parents.

Before 300 B.C. the Greek naturalist, empiricist and philosopher Aristotle
theorized about learning and memory, motivation and emotion, perception
and personality. He thought that everything we know comes from our
experiences with the environment.

During the Renaissance in Europe (14th 17th century)

Rene Descartes, French mathematician and philosopher, was also a

nativist and a proponent of dualism, view that the mind and body are
separate entities, proposed the existence of threads in the body that
controlled behavior (nerves). Argued about the movements without
thought (reflexes).

In Britain, John Locke, empiricist, claimed that the mind is a blank slate
at birth; knowledge comes from direct sensory experiences from bits of
info that we receive with our ears and eyes.

During the 19th century:

Laid the foundation for the scientific study of human behavior.
Demonstrated that nerves carry info from the senses to the brain, and
movement commands to the muscles, and also that different parts of the
brain are responsible for the control of specific behavior. They discovered
mental illnesses.

Hermann von Helmholtz, German physiologist, demonstrated that the

movement of impulses in the nerves and in the brain took a small but finite
amount of time.

Charles Darwin, naturalist, introduced the ideas of natural selection and

evolution. Proposed that the behaviors of humans evolved to increase
chances of survival and reproduction.

Helped other researches realize that they could study behavior using the
same methods in other areas of science.

Pioneers of Psychology:

Psychology arose as the synthesis of philosophy and physiology.

Psychology as a scientific discipline began with

the first psychology laboratory in 1879 at the
Germany. He also wrote the first textbook in
research assistant to von Helmholtz. Leipzig
psychology.

One of the students from Leipzig, G. Stanley Hall, founded the first
psychological laboratory in the United States at John Hopkins University in
1833 and founded the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1892.

The term psychology comes from two Greek words meaning the study of
the mind or soul. Introspection looking inward used by Edward
Titchener, another of Wundts students, and by William James, an
American philosopher/psychologist who wrote the first comprehensive
psychology textbook in 1890.

In Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus began a systematic program of

research on memory.

Mary Whiton Calkins was an American pioneer in the study of memory,

dreams, and personality, and was the first woman to be elected president
of APA.

Sigmund Freud, an Austrian physician, focused on disturbances of the

mind and developed both a theory of personality and the first systematic
method of psychotherapy (psychoanalysis).

William Wundt, founded

University of Leipzig in
psychology. He was a
became the center of

20th Century Psychology:

The problem with introspection is that no one else can verify what a
person is feeling or thinking. Psychology turned to a more objective
approach.
Edwin Thorndike studied learning cats and rats. Margaret Floy Washburn,
first woman to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, wrote a book on animal
behavior. Was also the president of APA.

Ivan Pavlov, Russian physiologist, demonstrated that dogs could be

conditioned to behave in certain ways every time a particular stimulus
appeared (classic conditioning).

John Watson redefined psychology as the science of observable

behavior, emphasizing the similarities between human behavior and
animal behavior, especially in the process of learning. This approach is
called behaviorism. This was the dominant perspective in American
psychology from 1920s to the 1960s under the leadership of B.F. Skinner,
who popularized the concept of reinforcement and the process of operant
conditioning.

Jean Piaget, Swiss psychologist, studied intellectual growth in children,

and Noam Chomsky, American linguist, began to recapture psychologys
interest in mental processes, and came to be defined as the science of
behavior and mental processes (cognitive revolution).

Humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and therapist Carl

Rogers emphasized that the concerns and capabilities of human beings
go well beyond the basic animal responses studied by the behaviorists.

In 1960s and 1970s research helped place individual behavior in the

context of groups and cultures.

In the 1980s and 1990s psychology returned once again to its roots in
physiology ad evolutionary biology, as discoveries in the brain provided
new insights on behavior.

What is Psychology?
Psychology today the science of behavior and mental processes.
Behavior is anything an organism does, actions. Mental processes are
the internal, subjective experiences we infer from behavior.
Wundts school divided into two: structuralism and functionalism.
Edward Bradford Titchener introduced structuralism at the Cornell
University. It aimed to discover the structural elements of the mind.
His method was to involve people in self introspection (looking inward),
training them to report elements of their different experiences.
Introspection required smart and verbal people. It was unreliable because
the results varied from person to person and experience to experience.
Also, people often dont know why we feel what we feel and do what we
do.

William James thought it more fruitful to study the functions of our

thoughts and feelings. The functions are adaptive. He was a teacher at
Harvard, and was the teacher of Mary Whiton Calkins.

Psychologys Biggest Question: Biggest issue

Nature nurture issue, the controversy over the relative contributions of
biology and experience.

Natural selection the evolutionary process. Nature selects the traits that
best enable an organism to survive and reproduce in an environment.

Psychologys three main levels of analysis:

Together, different levels of analysis form an integrated biopsychosocial
approach: biological, psychological, and social- cultural factors.
Biological natural selection of adaptive traits, genetic
predispositions responding to environment, brain mechanisms,
hormones.
Psychological learned fears and expectations, emotional
responses, cognitive processing and interpretations.
Social cultural influences presence of others, cultural, societal,
and family expectations, group influences, compelling models.
Each of psychologys perspective is helpful. But each by itself fails to
reveal the whole picture.
Psychologys Perspectives:
1. Neuroscience How the body and brain enable emotions, memories, and
sensory experiences.
2. Evolutionary how the natural selection of traits promoted the survival of
genes.
3. Behavior genetics how much our genes and our environment influence
our individual differences.
4. Cognitive how we encode, process, store, and retrieve info.
5. Social cultural how behavior and thinking vary across situations and
cultures.
6. Psychodynamic how behavior springs from unconscious drives and
conflicts.
7. Behavioral how we learn observable responses.
Psychologys subfields:
Basic research that builds psychologys knowledge base.
Applied research that tackles practical problems.
Counseling psychologists help people cope with challenges and crises
and to improve their personal and social functioning.
Clinical psychologists asses and treat mental, emotional, and behavior
disorders.
Both of them administer tests, provide counseling, and therapy and
sometimes conduct basic and applied research.
Psychiatrists provide psychotherapy, are medical doctors to prescribe
drugs and otherwise treat physical causes psychological disorders.
Psychology ranges through many fields.
Hindsight Bias:

Finding that something has happened makes it seem inevitable. Asking

people how and why they felt or acted as they did can sometimes be
misleading. Common sense easily describes what happened than what
will happen. I knew it all -along.

Overconfidence:
Us humans tend to be overconfident. We tend to think we know more than
we do. Once people know the answer, hindsight makes it seem obvious
they become overconfident.
Hindsight bias and overconfidence often lead us to overestimate our
intuition.
Scientific Attitude:
Science becomes societys garbage disposal by sending crazy ideas to it.
Being skeptical but not cynical, open but not gullible.
When ideas compete, skeptical testing can reveal which ones best match
the facts.
Humility awareness of out our own vulnerability to error and an
openness to surprises and new perspectives.
What matters is the truth nature reveals in response to our questioning.
Curiosity, skepticism, and humility helped make modern science.
The ideal that unifies psychologists with all scientists is the curious,
skeptical, and humble scrutiny of competing ideas.
Critical Thinking:
Smart thinking.
Examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, and
assesses conclusions.
How do Psychologists ask and answer fewer questions?
They use scientific method. It evaluates competing ideas with careful
observation and rigorous observations. It puts theories to the test.
The Scientific Method:
Theory is linked with observation. A scientific theory explains through an
integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts
behaviors or events.
By linking facts and bridging them to deeper principles, a theory offers a
useful summary.
A good theory produces testable predictions, called hypothesis. By testing
it, they specify what results support the theory and what results reject the
theory.

Psychologists report their research with precise operational definitions of

procedures and concepts. Such carefully worded statements should allow
others to replicate the original observations.
If other researchers recreate a study with different participants and
materials and get similar results, then our confidence in the findings
reliability grows.
The theory will be useful if it 1) effectively organizes a range of self
reports and observations, 2) implies clear predictions that anyone can use
to check the theory or to derive practical applications.
One can test the theories using descriptive methods, correlational
methods, and experimental methods.

Description: Case Study

Case study examines one individual in depth in hopes of revealing
things true of us all. They often suggest directions for further study, and
they show us what can happen.
Anytime someone mentions a finding, someone is sure to offer a
contradictory anecdote.
Individual cases can suggest fruitful ideas. Whats true of all of us can be
glimpsed in any one of us. But to discern the general truths that cover
individual cases, we must answer questions with other research methods.
The Survey:
The survey method looks at many cases in less depth. It asks people to
report their behavior or opinions. The answer often depends on the ways
questions are worded and respondents are chosen.

Wording effects it is a delicate matter, critical thinkers will reflect on how

the phrasing of a question might affect peoples expressed opinions.

Random sampling we can describe human experience by drawing on

memorable anecdotes and personal experience. Accurate picture of a
whole populations attitude and experience the representative sample.
The best basis for generalizing is from a representative sample.
Population the whole group you want to study and describe.
Random sample in which every person in the entire group has an
equal chance of participating. You number the names in the general
student listing and then use a random number generator to pick the
participants for your survey. Large representative samples are
better than small ones, but a small representative sample of 100 is
better than an unrepresentative sample of 500.
Consider the sample. You cannot compensate for an
unrepresentative sample by simply adding more people.

Naturalistic Observation:
Third descriptive method. Records behavior in natural environments. It
doesnt explain behavior. It can reveal some. It illuminates human
behavior.
It offers interesting snapshots of everyday life, but it does so without
controlling for all factors that may influence behavior. Can provide data for
correlational research.

Correlation:
Describing behavior is the first step. Surveys and naturalistic observation
often show us that one trait or behavior is related to another. Therefore,
they correlate. A statistical measure (correlation effect) helps figure how
closely two things vary together, and thus how well either one predicts the
other.
Scatterplots illustrates the range of possible correlations from a perfect
positive to a perfect negative. It is positive if two sets of scores rise and fall
together. It is negative if two sets of scores relate inversely. A weak
correlation has a coefficient near zero.
Statistics help demonstrate missing info. A correlation coefficient helps us
see the world more clearly by revealing the extent to which two things
relate.
Correlation and Causation:
Correlations help us predict. Correlation indicates the possibility of cause
effect relationship, but it does not prove causation.
Illusory Correlations:
Correlation coefficients make visible the relationships we might miss. They
also restrain our seeing relationships that actually dont exist. A perceived
but nonexistent correlation is an illusory correlation.
We are likely to notice and remember the occurrence of two such events
in sequence. They are basically random coincidences. We may forget they
are random and think they are correlated.
Perceiving Order in Random Events:
We look for order in random events. In random sequences, patterns and
streaks occur more often than people expect. There are no explanations
for this phenomenon.
Experimentation:
To isolate cause effect, psychologists can statistically control for other
factors. Experiments enable for a researcher to focus on the possible

effects of one or more factors by 1) manipulating the factors of interest

and 2) holding constant other factors.
Random Assignment if a behavior changes when we vary an
experimental factor, then we infer the factor is having an effect. Unlike
correlational studies, which uncover naturally occurring relationships, an
experiment manipulates a factor to determine its effect.
Double blind procedure neither the participants nor the research
assistants collecting the data will know which group is receiving the
treatment. The participants belief in its healing power and the staffs
enthusiasm for its potential can determine if the treatment actually helps.
Placebo effect thinking you are getting a treatment can boost your
spirits, relax your body, and relieve symptoms.
Experimental group people that receive the treatment.
Control group does not receive treatment.
Any differences between the groups should the effect of the treatment.
Independent and Dependent Variables:
Independent - the factor being manipulated.
Dependent the effect of one or more independent variables on some
measurable behavior. Both variable are given precise operational
definitions, which specify the procedures that manipulate the independent
variable or measure the dependent variable. This enables others to repeat
the study.
A variable is anything that can vary. Experiments aim to manipulate an
independent variable, measure the dependent variable and control all
other variables. It has two groups: experimental and control or comparison
group. It tests the effect of the independent variable on the dependent.
Describing data:
Researchers must organize their data. Read the labels not the range.
Measures of Central Tendency:
Mode the most frequently occurring score.
Mean the most commonly reported or arithmetic average.
Median the midpoint.
They neatly summarize data. Always note which measure of central
tendency is reported. If its a mean, consider whether a few atypical
scores could be distorting it.
Measures of Variation:

The range of scores- the gap between the lowest and highest scores
provides only a crude estimate of variation because a couple of extreme
scores will create a deceptively large range.
Standard deviation the more useful standard for measuring how much
scores deviate from one another.
The computation assembles info about how individual scores differ from
the mean.
Normal curve the bell shaped distribution.

Standard deviation =

s umof ( deviations)2
number of scores

Making Inferences:
When is an observed difference reliable?
Representative samples are better than biased samples.
Less variable observations are more reliable than those that are more
variable. An average is more reliable when it comes from scores with low
variability.
More cases are better than a few.
Dont be overly impressed by a few anecdotes. Generalizations based on
a few unrepresentative cases are unreliable.
When is a difference significant?
When the difference is large. When the averages are reliable, then their
differences are reliable. Then they have statistical significance.
Statistical significance indicates likelihood that a result will happen by
chance. But this does not say anything about the importance of the result.
Frequently asked questions about psychology:
Can lab experiments illuminate everyday life?
The experimenter intends the lab environment to be a simplified reality
one that stimulates and controls important features of everyday life.
The purpose is not to recreate the exact behaviors but to test theoretical
principles.
Psychologists concerns lies less with particular behaviors than with
general principles that help explain many behaviors.
Does behavior depend on ones culture and gender?
Culture shared ideas and behaviors that one generation passes on to
the next. Culture does matter. It shapes our behavior. It influences our
standards.
Studying people of all races and cultures helps us discern our similarities
and our differences, our diversity.
Gender matters as well. We are very different, but very similar at the same
time.

Even when specific attitudes and behaviors vary by gender or cultures, the
underlying processes are pretty much the same.

Why do psychologists study animals, and is it ethical to experiment on animals?

They want to understand how species learn, behave, and think. They also
study them to learn about people, by doing experiments permissible to
animals.
We are animals. Animal experiments have led to treatments fro human
diseases.
The animal protection movement protests the use of animals in
psychological, biological, and medical research.
Some organizations want to replace experiments on animals with
naturalistic observation. Scientists view the situation as to compassion for
animals versus compassions for people.
The basic one is whether it is right to pace the well being of humans
above that of animals.
In deciding which animals have rights, we each have draw our own cut
off line somewhere across the animal kingdom. Most researchers ensure
the well being for the captive animals. Animals have themselves
benefited from animal research. Psychology cares for the welfare of
humans, primarily, but animals as well.
Is it ethical to experiment on people?
Ethical principles developed by the APA urge investigators to 1) obtain the
informed consent of potential participants, 2) protect them from harm and
discomfort, 3) treat information about individual participants confidential, 4)
fully explain the research afterward.
The ideal is for the researcher to be informative and considerate.
Is psychology free of value judgments?
Psychology is not value free. Values do affect what we study and how we
interpret results. Our preconceptions and interpretations can bias our
observations. Even describing can reflect our values.
Psychologys purpose is to enlighten. It cant address all the questions but
it speaks to some important ones.