Psychology 2550A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Positron Emission Tomography, Rorschach Test

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2550A/B
• Professor: David Vollick

Document Summary

To find out how individuals understand themselves. Psychologists obtain information about people from many sources, through a wide range of strategies. To be truly scientific, a conceptualization must be testable. Oldest method for studying personality, and most favoured by psychodynamic and. Can be expensive and time consuming quick self-reports are often preferred. Have become more easily scored and coded. A test in any standardized measure of behaviour, including verbal behaviour. Self-reports are tests that include statements people make about themselves. Questions and responses are clearly defined ex. Client presented with ambiguous stimuli/questions that have no right or wrong answers. Disadvantage: real world behaviours, good external validity, loss of control extraneous variables, observer biases, poor internal validity. Some practical methods to assess emotional reactions physiologically include: polygraph (lie detector), electrocardiogram (ekg), plethysmograph, galvanic skin response (gsr), electroencephalograph (eeg), positron emission tomography (pet), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri).