PSYC1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Dementia, Foolishness, Organism
Lecture 1 - Introduction, What is Psychology, History of Psychology and its Legacy
Overview
● Why would you study psychology?
● Branches of psychology?
● What is psychology?
● History of psychology and its legacy
Why Study Psychology
● You want to know why ppl behave the way they do, how they think, remember and
make decisions
○ Because this is most of the quantity of the quality of your life; how other
ppl r believing things, choosing things, deciding to do things
○ Overwhelmingly what contributes most a person's meaning, happiness,
mental and physical health is: relationships to other ppl
● You want to understand yourself better, especially your mind
○ Your mind: most familiar and most mysterious to you
○ What does your consciousness do?
○ Why do we like things in story form?
● You want to help ppl and that may require a more scientific understanding how they
function
○ Ppl suffer psychologically and to dif levels and maybe you want to levitate
suffering
● Maybe you are into altered states of consciousness and you want to understand
better
○ altered states of consciousness more prevalent than ppl realize
○ Ex.
■ mindfulness, meditation
■ Generating out of body experiences to reveal altered states of
consciousness
■ Ex. of altered state of consciousness: Night terrors, lucid
dreams
● Psychology takes these experiences seriously and
tells us something about how the mind works
● Maybe you want to improve how your memory works and how you make decisions
=self-improvement
Source: Prof. Vervaeke’s lecture slide 26
○ Allan Paivio's Dual-Coding theory
■ If you want to remember something, you should code it in
multimedia, have verbal and visual code (multiple codings) to
better memorize
● More likely to remember if you have multiple
connections to the information
○ Understanding how your memory and decision making skills work can
help you improve these skills
■ Intervening the way your mind works to make it work the way
you want
○ There's no enemy or ally greater than your own mind
● Maybe you want to understand how and why your family messed you up and
doomed you to romantic failure
○ Relationship w/ your parents have a lot to do with the ppl you're
attracted to
○ Sometimes you find ppl who look like your parents more attractive
● So we see that there are a lot of issues that psych is expected to address: behavior,
subjective experience, how ppl's minds function and/or malfunction, consciousness,
learning, and development
● That means that there are a lot of different branches to Psychology
The Branches of Psychology
Source: Prof. Vervaeke’s lecture slide 29
● Abnormal: how ppl's functioning can malfunction due to cognitive reason,
personality regions..etc.
○ Eg. Trump
● Regardless of political views, studies on whether he
demonstrates abnormal psychology: shows symptoms of
having dementia, narcissistic personality disorder
● Behavioral genetics: understanding biological genetic factors driving behaviors
○ How much of your intelligence is contributed by your genes?
● Behavioral neuroscience: linking specific behavior patterns to underlying physical
components or activities in the brain
● Cognitive: study info processing, how cognition, thinking, reasoning works
● Comparative: compare dif grps of ppl; how much does your culture impact your
cognition
○ It matters because almost all of psychology is done on weird (western
educated industrial rich ppl), almost all participants are in university
structure. But weird ppl only make up 12% of population of the world
Document Summary
Lecture 1 - introduction, what is psychology, history of psychology and its legacy. You want to know why ppl behave the way they do, how they think, remember and make decisions. Because this is most of the quantity of the quality of your life; how other ppl r believing things, choosing things, deciding to do things. Overwhelmingly what contributes most a person"s meaning, happiness, mental and physical health is: relationships to other ppl. You want to understand yourself better, especially your mind. Your mind: most familiar and most mysterious to you. You want to help ppl and that may require a more scientific understanding how they function. Ppl suffer psychologically and to dif levels and maybe you want to levitate suffering. Maybe you are into altered states of consciousness and you want to understand better. Altered states of consciousness more prevalent than ppl realize. Generating out of body experiences to reveal altered states of consciousness.
