ALHT106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Humanistic Psychology, B. F. Skinner, Classical Conditioning
Introduction to Psychology
• What is psychology
o The scientific investigation of mental processes (thinking, remembering and feeling)
and behaviour
o The information-processing and behaviour controlling mechanisms of animate,
living creatures
o Takes special interest in minds and behaviours of creatures with especially complex
and extensive cognitive abilities
• Psychology and allied health
o Modern conceptions of health must be inclusive of mental and social factors
o Many allied health practitioners will work closely in health teams that include
professional psychologists
o All health professionals need to work extensively with real people during some of
the most stressful and vulnerable times of their lives
o When you have a duty of care to your clients, the insights of psychology will help
you help them
• Folk vs scientific psychology
o Folk
• Our everyday tendency to form intuitive theories about ourselves and those
around us, to predict or explain the things they do
• We are social creatures - paying special attention to the behaviour of others,
to try to comprehend, explain and predict what other people are going to do
and why
▪ Intuitive and partially innate
▪ Built upon biases
▪ Culturally informed and reinforced
▪ Designed to be 'useful', not true
• Can normally be enough for most occupations
• Prone to biases and heuristic errors that can spell disaster when you a placed
in a position of trust, trying to assist a vulnerable client
o Scientific psychology
• The systematic and formalised study of though and behaviour employing the
methods and institutions or empirical science
▪ Painstakingly learned
▪ Built on rigorous methods
▪ Researchers and practitioners
▪ Designed for testable accuracy
• History
o The traditions of contemporary psychology grew out of the related fields of
speculative and natural philosophy back when the European scientific revolution
started gaining momentum after the Enlightenment period
o Psychology grew out of the philosophy of mind
o Complicated subject matter and fractured nature of the preceding philosophical
traditions, it is seen as a 'younger' science - took longer for empirical methodologies
to be applied to the mind
• Current perspectives
o Psychodynamics
• School of thought introduced in the works of Sigmund Freud who emphasised
unconscious mental forces in his psychoanalytic theory
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