PSYC100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Mental Disorder, School Violence, Neurochemistry

• School: University of Delaware
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC100
• Professor: Quinn Paul

Document Summary

Psychology - the science that seeks to understand behavior and mental processes and to apply that understanding in the service of human welfare: study of how behaviors/mental processes make someone an individual. Positive psychology - focuses on people"s positive experiences and characteristics such as happiness, optimism and resilience. Subfields: biological psychologists - aka physiological psychologists, use high- tech scanning devices and other methods to study how biological processes in brain affect and are affected by behavior and mental processes. These many subfields often overlap and so do the activities of the psychologists working in them. Psychologists use scientific method to test theories and benefit from research of colleagues. Empiricism - proponents including john locke, george berkeley and david. Hume challenged long-accepted idea that some knowledge is innate; argue that what we know about the world comes from experience and observation, not imagination or intuition: our minds are like a blank slate (tabula rasa)