PSY 102 Study Guide - Spring 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Memory, Canada, Psychology
12 Oct 2018
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PSY 102
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
1. What is psychology? (pp. 2-5)
-psychology: "the scientific study of mind, brain, and behaviour" (p. 3) thinking memory, feeling
How we know, what we know
Relationship mind and brain.
E.g. what causes aggression?
• Brains state?
• Hormone levels? Slower than brain activity
• Learned behaviour?
• Where you live? (northen states is more violate than south state) early ancestors are
different lives.
• Evolution?
• All, some, or none of these things?
-why do people do the things they do?
1. hard question to answer, e.g., :(5 different reason)
2. psychological influence is rarely independent of each other
3. individual differences (p. 4)
4. behaviour is multiply determined (p. 3)- reciprocal determinism is we mutually influence
each other's behavior.
5. Often shaped by culture.
2. History of psychology (pp. 5-15)
• first psychology research lab established in 1879 by William Wundt in Germany (p.8)
• G. Stanley Hall -> first North American lab (1883)
• James Mark Baldwin -> first Canadian lab (1891)
• since the Ancient Greeks, philosophers speculated about thought and behaviour
• philosophical theories relied on logic
• early psychologists wanted to apply more empirical methods (p. 7)empirical methods is
based on observation.
• psychologists were also interested in insights from other sciences, epecially, medicine
-e.g., discovery of "Broca's area" in "Tan's" brain in 1861
left hemisphere are massed.)
-What should psychologists study?
• Wundt -> mental experiences (p. 8) conscious questions
-How can this be measured?
• introspection: the careful, systematic self-observation of one's own conscious experience
(p. 8)
-e.g. 1, Q. How quickly does forgetting happen?
3letter non senses. How many letter are remmeber. After 20 min 50% or 25% why he did? -
-Ebbinghaus (1885) tested his ability to remember lists of nonsense words at
different time intervals
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-e.g. 2,Q. How long does it take for a thought to form?
- Reaction time - amount time
- stimulus: something that can be detected by the senses
-simple reaction time (SRT): amount of time passed between being presented with
a stimulus and producing a response
-choice reaction time (CRT): amount of time passed where the response involves a
choice
-assumption: CRT - SRT = amount of time it takes to make a conscious choice
• structuralism -> What is the structure of conscious experience? The elements of the mind
Charles Darwin. Evolutionary sense, early ancestor survives
• functionalism -> What is the purpose of conscious experience?
-structuralism/functionalism debate fizzles out
-aspects of both persist to today
-two much larger upheavals start around 1920s: more focused on psychoanalysis
and behaviorism
-psychoanalysis
-Freud thought that behaviour is governed by esp. sexual and aggressive thoughts, desires, and
memories lying beyond conscious awareness (unconscious) (more in Chapter 11 Personality)
(Conscious min is water, unconscious is bottom of ocean)
-Freud interpreted a variety of observations:
-psychoanalysis
-"free association," hypnosis
-dream
-spoken language
-visual symbols
-psychoanalysis still practiced today, but Freud's methods have been criticized as unscientific
• Behaviorism
-behaviorists - "no one can see or touch another's thoughts"
behaviorism: psychology should study only observable behavior (p. 9)
-psychology should relate behaviours ("responses") to events in the environment ("stimuli”)
anything you can receive
-behaviourists believed all behaviour (human and animal) can be explained as learned responses
to stimuli in our environment
-"Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes, and they tend not to repeat
responses that lead to neutral or negative outcomes" (B. F. Skinner)
-Q. How are stimulus-response associations formed?
-operant conditioning chamber, e.g., "Skinner box"
-experimenter manipulates the outcomes of animal's responses
-observes how this affects learning
-"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and,
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