Wade and Tavris © 2005 Prentice Hall 1-1 Invitation To Psychology Carol Wade and Carol Tavris...

Wade and Tavris © 2005 Prentice Hall

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Invitation To Psychology

Carol Wade and Carol TavrisPowerPoint Presentation by

H. Lynn BradmanMetropolitan Community College-Omaha


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What is Psychology?

Chapter 1


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What is Psychology?

• The Science of Psychology• What Psychologists Do• Critical and Scientific Thinking in Psychology• Descriptive Studies: Establishing the Facts• Correlational Studies: Looking for Relationships• The Experiment: Hunting for Causes• Evaluating the Findings


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The Science of Psychology

• Psychology, Pseudoscience, and Common Sense

• The Birth of Modern Psychology• Psychology's Present


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Defining Psychology

• Psychology is the discipline concerned with behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an organism's physical state, mental state, and external environment


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Empirical Evidence

• Evidence gathered by careful observation, experimentation, and measurement.


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Psychology, Pseudoscience, and Common Sense

• Scientific Psychology bears little relationship to "Pop" Psychology

• Fortune telling, numerology, graphology, and astronomy are not part of psychology

• Psychology is not just a fancy name for common sense

• Psychological research often produces findings that contradict popular beliefs


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Bumpy Logic

• Phrenology was a 19th-century pseudoscience– No scientific

basis• Phrenology linked

bumps on the skull with character traits


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The Birth of Modern Psychology

• Functionalism: An early psychological approach that emphasized the function or purpose of behavior and consciousness

• Psychoanalysis: A theory of personality and a method of psychotherapy, originally formulated by Sigmund Freud, which emphasizes unconscious motives and conflicts


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Psychology's Present

• Biological Perspective• Learning Perspective• Cognitive Perspective• Sociocultural Perspective• Psychodynamic Perspective


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Biological Perspective

• A psychological approach that emphasizes bodily events and changes associated with actions, feelings, and thoughts


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Learning Perspective

• A psychological approach that emphasizes how the environment and experience affect a person's or animal's actions: It includes behaviorism and social-cognitive learning theories


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Cognitive Perspective

• A psychological approach that emphasizes mental processes in perception, memory, language, problem solving, and other areas of behavior


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Sociocultural Perspective

• A psychological approach that emphasizes social and cultural influences on behavior


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Psychodynamic Perspective

• A psychological approach that emphasizes unconscious dynamics within the individual, such as inner forces, conflicts, or the movement of instinctual energy


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What Psychologists Do

• Psychological Research• Psychological Practice• Psychology in the Community


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Psychological Research

• Basic Psychology: The study of psychological issues in order to seek knowledge for its own sake rather than for its practical application

• Applied Psychology: The study of psychological issues that have direct practical significance; also the application of psychological findings.


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Psychological Practice

Psychotherapist Person who does psychotherapy; credentials and training vary

Clinical Psychologist

Has a doctoral degree: Ph.D., Ed.D., or Psy.D.

Psychoanalyst Has specific training in psychoanalysis after an advanced degree (usually M.D. or Ph.D.)

Psychiatrist A physician (M.D.) with specialization in psychiatry

Other professionals

Licensing requirements vary by state; generally at least an M.A. Can be social worker (LCSW), counselor (MFCC), or other.


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Critical and Scientific Thinking in Psychology


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Critical Thinking

• Critical Thinking: The ability and willingness to assess claims and make objective judgments on the basis of well-supported reasons and evidence, rather than emotion or anecdote


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Critical Thinking Guidelines

• Ask Questions: Be willing to wonder• Define Your Terms• Examine the Evidence• Analyze Assumptions and Biases• Avoid Emotional Reasoning• Don't Oversimplify• Consider Other Interpretations• Tolerate Uncertainty


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Hypothesis

• A statement that attempts to predict or to account for a set of phenomena; scientific hypotheses specify relationships among events or variables and are empirically tested.


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Operational Definition

• A precise definition of a term in a hypothesis, which specifies the operations for observing and measuring the process or phenomenon being measured.


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Principle of Falsifiability

• The principle that a scientific theory must make predictions that are specific enough to expose the theory to the possibility of disconfirmation; that is, the theory must predict not only what will happen, but also what will not happen.


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Principle of Falsifiability


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Theory

• An organized system of assumptions and principles that purports to explain a specified set of phenomena and their interrelationships.


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Descriptive Studies: Establishing the Facts

• Case Studies• Observational Studies• Tests• Surveys


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Case Studies

• A detailed description of a particular individual being studied or treated.


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Observational Studies

• Studies in which the researcher carefully and systematically observes and records behavior without interfering with that behavior; it may involve either naturalistic or laboratory observation.


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Tests

• Standardize: To develop uniform procedures for giving and scoring a test.

• Norms: Established standards of performance.

• Reliability: Consistency of scores derived from a test.

• Validity: The ability of a test to measure what it was designed to measure.


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Surveys

• Survey: Questionnaires and interviews that ask people directly about their experiences, attitudes, or opinions.

• Representative Sample: A group of subjects, selected from a population, which matches the population on important characteristics.


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Correlational Studies: Looking for Relationships


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Correlation

• Correlation: A measure of how strongly two variables are related to one another

• Variables: Characteristics of behavior or experience that can be measured or described by a numeric scale


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Types of Correlations

• Positive correlation: Increases in one variable are associated with increases in the other; decreases are likewise associated

• Negative correlation: Increases in one variable are associated with decreases in the other


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The Experiment: Hunting for Causes

• Experimental Variables• Experimental and Control Conditions• Experimenter Effects• Advantages and Limitations of

Experiments


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Experimental Variables

• Independent Variable: A variable that an experimenter manipulates.

• Dependent Variable: A variable than an experimenter predicts will be affected by manipulations of the independent variable.


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Experiments

• Experiment: A controlled test of a hypothesis in which the researcher manipulates one variable to discover its effect on another.


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Experimental and Control Conditions

• Experimental Condition: In an experiment, a condition in which subjects are exposed to manipulations of the independent variable.

• Control Condition: A comparison condition in which subjects are not exposed to the same treatment as in the experimental condition.


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Experimental Design

• Hypothesis: Nicotine in cigarettes impairs driving.

• All conditions kept the same for both groups except nicotine.– Control condition is

given placebo (inactive) cigarettes

• Number of collisions is measured.


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Random Assignment

• A procedure for assigning people to experimental and control groups in which individuals have the same probability as an other of being assigned to either group.


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Placebo

• An inactive substance or fake treatment used as a control in an experiment or given by a practitioner to a patient.


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Experimenter Effects

• Unintended changes in subjects’ behavior due to cues inadvertently given by the experimenter

• Double-Blind Study: Experiment where neither subjects nor people running the study know which subjects are in the control group and which are in the experimental group until after results are tallied.


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Advantages and Limitations of Experiments

• Experiments allow conclusions about cause-effect relationships.

• Participants in experiments are not always representative of larger population.– Much psychology research is carried out

using colleges students as participants.• Field Research: Descriptive or experimental

research conducted in a natural setting outside the laboratory.


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Evaluating the Findings

• Why Psychologists Use Statistics• From the Laboratory to the Real World


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Why Psychologists Use Statistics

• Descriptive Statistics: Organize and summarize data

• Inferential Statistics: Assess how meaningful results are, such as differences between groups.– Significance tests assess how likely it

is that a study’s results occurred merely by chance


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From the Laboratory to the Real World

• Choosing the Best Explanation– Sometimes there are competing

explanations for the same events• Judging the Result’s Importance

– Statistical significance does not prove that a result is important, only that it is reliable

– Meta-analysis combines and analyzes data from many studies


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Different Research Methods

• Cross-Sectional Study: Subjects of different ages are compared at a given time.

• Longitudinal Study: Subjects are followed and periodically reassessed over a period of time

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