/fuk6/

Trap
 Assessment methods Weighting in final course
grade (%)
In class test
Midterm test 30%
Final test (assessment period, non- 30%
cumulative)
Tutorial
Online Forum Posts 10%
2 mini-project reports (~200 words 10%
× 2)
Individual project & essay
Develop a good habit (1200 words) 16%

Research participation 4%
Total 100%
 • Online delivery (YT livestreaming)

• Mid-term and final tests

• Tutorials (Sign-up, assessments)

HIGHLIGHTS
• Individual project (plan ahead)

• Research participation

• House rules
 LET’S TALK ABOUT THE
TEXTBOOK

• Textbook Adoption Form from Swindon

• Lectures and the textbook

• Test coverage
PSYCHOLOGY IS A SCIENCE
(?)

PSYC1001
Lecture 1
#1 LORENA

• Had no psychology background.

Owner of a tutorial and learning
center. She was looking for a
”psychologist” to teach psychology
knowledge to the students

• ”Teach them some psychology tricks,

like mind-reading, magic, fortune-
telling, dream interpretation, hypnosis,
funny psychological tests …”
#2 HENRY (MANY YEARS AGO)

• Finished his A-level exam, and was

deciding his picks in the JUPAS. Among
all the subjects he could choose from,
he put psychology as the first choice

• “I am going to understand how the

mind works! I am going to be a
psychological doctor and help a lot of
people. Studying psychology is going
to be awesome!”
#3 PETE

• Obtained his first degree in

psychology 7 years ago

• ”Psychology is a joke. Psychologists

pretend to be doing science, but the
so-called scientific approach does not
help at all understanding human
beings. Philosophy and writing novels
are better ways to understand
humans”
WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY? WHAT IS NOT?
WHAT ARE PSYCHOLOGY’S ROOTS
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOT

• We are curious about ourselves

• Some questions that have been raised

and debated for a long time
1. What is the source of knowledge?
2. Why do people become insane?
3. What is the physical substrate of our mind?
• Are we born to be good or evil?

• Are we born as pure blank slate, or are we programmed to a

certain destiny since birth?

• Nowadays, any psychologist would probably tell you both

nature and nurture exert some effect on us
• How much?
• When?
• Why?
 INSANITY

• Supernatural explanation of psychological

disorders and abnormalities
• The mind is possessed by some evil spirits
• Release them!

• A medical model of psychological disorders

• Cranial blood pressure
Our ancestors might have
attempted to cure headaches
and psychological disorder by
drilling holes in the skull
PHYSIC AL SUBSTRATES

• Descartes’s mind-body dualism

• The mind and body are separable
• The mind is non-physical

▪ It’s in the heart

▪ Aristotle
▪ Chinese medicine
▪ Psychology – 心理學 /sam, lei, hok/

▪ It’s the combination of elements

▪ The Greek four humors (fluids) theory
▪ Phlegm, Blood, Bile, Plasma
▪ Blood-letting therapy
▪ Ying-Yang
▪ Wu-Xing (the five elements philosophy)
 PHYSIC AL SUBSTRATES

• Neuropsychology
• Mental functions are all in the nervous system
• Memory, sensation/ perception, language, creativity, emotions, personality,
social tendency …
• Brain, neurons, neurotransmitters
HOW DID THE SCIENCE OF
PSYCHOLOGY BEGIN

From questions to answers

 FROM QUESTIONS TO ANSWERS

• Experiments – Psychophysics
• Studying the mind with physical measurements
• E.g. Reaction Time/ Stimulus detection
• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

• Structuralism
• Reducing the human mind into building blocks
• Edward Titchener (1867-1923)
• c.f. the periodic table
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), seated in this photo, is
considered the first experimental psychologist.
 TITCHENER’S
INTROSPECTION

• What is your conscious experience with

a lemon? How can you break down this
experience to its fundamental
components?
 STRUCTURALISM
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
CHALLENGING STRUCTURALISM
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
 Our experience is more
than the sum of its
elements

GESTALT
PSYCHOLOGY

The three Pacmen have

become 1 invisible
triangle and 3 covered
circles
 FUNCTIONALISM

• The mind is not a fixed structure

• It is wrong to attempt to study its building blocks

• In connection with the Darwinian theory of

evolution
• Behavior is purposeful, serves adaptive purposes Williams James (1842-
1910) – The chief
proponent of
functionalism
 Which food tastes better?
What function does this preference serve?
 CLINICAL ROOTS OF
PSYCHOLOGY
• Treating hysteria patients with no apparent
physical cause
• e.g. Hysterical paralysis

• Seeking answers from the unconscious mind

• Unlocking it with dream analysis and hypnosis
• Primitive sexual drives
• Sex/ Aggression
The work of Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) on consciousness,
sexuality, abnormal behavior, and
psychotherapy played a dominant
role in psychology during the first
half of the 20th century
 CLINICAL ROOTS OF
PSYCHOLOGY
• Humanistic Psychology

• Rejecting Freud’s idea that humans are innately uncivilized

• People are innately good, and are motivated to achieve a better-self (self-
actualization)

• Human potential vs. Human limitations

• Carl Rogers (1902-1987)

• Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

• Self-actualization as the ultimate

goal

• Problem arises as we fail to fulfill

lower needs because of social
constraints

Definitely NOT because you feared being

castrated by your father when the 3-year-old
you saw his huge penis in a changing room
 BEHAVIORISM VS. THE
COGNITIVE REVOLUTION
• Behaviorism
• The human mind is a black box
• Being unable to see what’s inside,
we better stick with what’s
observable (behavior)
• Cognitive Psychology
• Many human activities cannot be
explained by behavior or direct
experience
• Theories on how mental processes take
place
• e.g. language, problem solving, reasoning
PROBLEM SOLVING AND INSIGHT

• Can you solve this problem by repeated

practice, like what behaviorism suggests?

• Or does the answer just appear without any

warning, like a mysterious circuit in your
brain?

▪ Answer: date
 WHAT DO PSYCHOLOGISTS
STUDY NOW?

• Five major perspectives

• Biological psychology
• Evolutionary psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Clinical psychology

• An integrated approach
LET’S TAKE A BREAK!
THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE
FOLLOWING STATEMENTS?
“Physics is a science”
“Psychology is a science”
 ANY SCIENCE STUDENTS HERE?

• “Physics is a science” is so deep-rooted in our mind

that it does not require any mentioning or emphasis

• Psychologists borrow the scientific approach from

natural sciences to study human behavior and mental
processes

• Human factors make the scientific approach difficult,

but also important, in studying psychology
 WHAT DEFINES THE
SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

• Objectivity

• Critical thinking

• Ethical research
 OBJECTIVITY

• The practice of basing conclusions on facts without

influence of personal emotion and bias

▪ Theory
▪ Human intelligence is determined
by the size of the brain
 • Theory
• Skull size and shape determines
human’s intelligence

• Nott and Glidden’s theory of

polygenesis

This illustration from an American polygenist work tries to show that the “Greek” and
“Negro” are as physically different from each other as from the chimpanzee. The “Greek”
head is not based on a human skull, however, but on an ancient statue that 19th-century
European scholars considered the epitome of human beauty.

https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/%E2%80%9Cskulls%E2%80%9D-josiah-clark- 44
nott-and-george-robert-glidden-1857-ce
 • “The negro achieves his greatest perfection, physical
and moral, and also greatest longevity, in a state of
slavery”

Josiah Clark Nott

(1804-1873)

As cited in:

Darnell, R., & Gleach, F. (Eds.). (2007). Histories of anthropology annual (Vol. 3). U of 45
Nebraska Press.
 • Samuel Morton (1849)
Possible problems measured the cranial
1. Variation in size (errors) capacity of skulls of different
2. Expectation effect of the researcher races by filling them with
white mustard seeds
 OBJECTIVITY

• Morton’s data support white supremacy

• Caucasians > (Asians, Native Indians, Africans)
• Was Morton biased in his methodology?

▪ In a paper published in Science, anthropologist Stephen Gould (1978)

challenged the objectivity of the study
▪ He (Morton) did not distinguish male from female skulls; many non-
white subsamples contained female skulls only
▪ Measurement errors could not be dismissed, even Morton
substituted Mustard seeds with lead shot BBs
▪ The reported difference disappeared with the above factors
controlled for
 CRITIC AL THINKING

• The ability to think clearly, rationally, and

independently

• Be skeptical toward scientific evidence

• Who presented the evidence? Any conflict of interest?
• How was the scientific evidence obtained?
• Reliability and validity
• Was the conclusion drawn correctly?
• E.g. Drawing causal effects from correlational (not
experimental) data
 CRITICAL THINKING –
ANIMAL TELEPATHY
• Be skeptical when someone claims that he/she can communicate with any animal
by seeing its picture

• “It is TOO difficult to explain to you. It has something to do with quantum

physics and the string theory”
▪ Skepticism
▪ How many people on earth dare to claim
themselves as experts in quantum physics?

▪ Does it work on humans?

▪ Unfalsifiable statements – “If my telepathy does not

work, it is because the pet is very cautious and does
not trust me yet …”

http://www.ejinsight.com/20170713-netizens-mock-pet-psychics-over-flunked-tortoise-test/
▪ Hypothesis
▪ If one can actually communicate with animals, he/she should be able
to tell a prop turtle from a real one

▪ Research advice from a psychologist

▪ Replication with multiple trials
▪ He may not be 100% correct, but if the accuracy is well above
50%, that is still a good sign)

▪ Blind test
▪ Neither the subject nor the experimenter knows the hypothesis
▪ Expectation effect
 ETHIC AL CONCERNS

• One criticism to i-Cable’s investigative

report of animal telepathy is the use of
deception

• The subjects had no idea they were being

tested, nor have they given consent for their
names, the content, and the footage to be
released

Is this practice acceptable?

Why and why not?
 ETHIC AL CONCERNS

• Research advice from a psychologist

• Get a consent from the subjects first
• Assure anonymity and confidentiality
• With given consent, give subjects a blind test to reduce bias
• vs. deceiving them at the beginning

• If no practitioner agrees to participate…

• Get a group of naïve participants to join the programme
• Pre/post test
 CONCLUDING REMARKS

• We study psychology, but we are NOT psychic

• Psychological research in the past 100 years has raised

more questions than answered

https://giphy.com/gifs/pizza-professor-x-psychic-haGJwxc00T3tC
 CONCLUDING REMARKS

• Some psychological ideas have evolved into pop-culture

phenomena, or found applications in other places
 CONCLUDING REMARKS

• There are many ways psychologists contribute to society. Being

a clinical psychologist is only one of them
 CONCLUDING REMARKS

• Some psychological studies have been found nonreplicable,

fraudulent, or using questionable research methods

▪ That’s why we need even

more rigorous practice
and methodology in
psychological science
 READING/ ASSIGNMENTS

• Chapters 1 and 2