PSYC 2015 Lecture 2: Bio Psych Week 1
Document Summary
Definition of biological psychology: branch that studies biological foundations of behavior, emotions and mental processes, concerned with relationship between psychological phenomena and underlying physiological events. Reductionism: theory that all phenomena can be understood in terms of their constituents, hierarchies in science, sociology // psychology, biology, chemistry // physics, reductionism has a limit, cannot reduce event to subatomic particles. Emergentism: theory that each level of the hierarchy can be a set of phenomena which cannot be anticipated by their constituents. Limits of neuroscience: problems of measurement, complexity, study behaving animals. Issues to keep in mind: generality - how broadly the studies apply, external validity - likelihood of observing in the real world, scale - what spatial and temporal extent do the phenomena span. Internal validity - how certain are we that we"re measuring what we think we"re measuring (this must be present)
