PSYC 100- Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 29 pages long!)

• School: George Mason University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Hertz

Document Summary

Psychology: formally defined as the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. The scope of contemporary psychology is very broad ranging from the behavior of a single brain cell to the behavior of a crowd of people or even entire cultures. Psychologists are just as interested in normal, everyday behavior as psychological disorders. Want to use their knowledge to optimize human performance and potential. The four basic goals of psychology are to describe, predict, explain, and control or influence behavior and mental processes. Earliest origins traced back centuries to the writings of the great philosophers. Aristotle wrote extensively about topics like sleep, dreams, the senses, and memory. Descartes proposed interactive dualism- the idea that the mind and body were separate entities that interact to produce sensations, emotions, and other conscious experiences. Wilhelm wundt used scientific methods to study fundamental psychological processes, such as mental reaction times in response to visual or auditory sense stimuli.