The psychology class where I was not as late as last time but still

missed out on sitting with that girl from my group ‍♀

🤷🏻‍
️️
🙁🙃
● Unit 1
● “a nasty little subject”
● Truth- no. Insight- yes. True for most of the people most of the time. You’ll have
to accept that.
● The scientific study of the mind, brain, and behaviour.
● Mind is the expression of the brain; mind is the internal, brain is the external.
● 5 Main Challenges
● Human behaviour is difficult to predict
● Actions are multiply determined
● ex. Violence = Poverty? Genetics? Environment?
1. Psychological influences are rarely independent
● ex. Anorexia Nervosa (perfectionism + anxiety)
3. Individual differences among people
● Can’t generalize 100% (trying to go from unique to general)
4. People influence one another
● Reciprocal determinism
● People can bring out the extroverted and introverted sides of people; when
exposed to one or the other, people adapt to that side of their personality more
comfortably and effectively
5. Behaviour is shaped by culture
● Limits generalization

● Originally psychology was considered a part of philosophy (thinking about the

mind; observation and common sense)
● At first people did not use science in their psychological thinking; they just
thought about the mind and how/when common sense should work
● William Wundt - first psychology lab, 1879 (introspection - look into your mind)
● Breaking away from spiritualism
● Theoretical perspectives in psychology
● How can we explain behaviour?
● There are 5 primary schools of thought that have shaped modern psychology
(SFBCP: structuralism, functionalism, behaviourism, cognitivism, and
psychoanalysis)
● Which one is correct?

● Structuralism
● What is conscious thought like?
● William Wundt and E.B Titchener
● Aim: identify the most fundamental elements of psychological experience
● Got rid of structuralism; cannot expand on conscious thoughts enough to study it
● What are we experiencing? (what is conscious thought, what is common sense,
what is memory, etc.)

● Functionalism
● Why do we have thoughts, feelings, and behaviours?
● William James, heavily influenced by Charles Darwin
● Aim: understand the adaptive purposes of psychological characteristics
● Why are we experiencing these things? (why do we have memory, why do we
forget things, why do we fall in love, etc.)
● W. James first thought of the stream of consciousness

● Behaviourism
● Watson and Skinner
● Aim: uncovering the general laws of learning by focusing on external observable
elements
● Considered “black box” psychology; the mind is mysterious and cannot be
physically looked into

● Cognitivism
● Piaget and Neisser
● Aim: understand mental processes underlying thinking in a variety of contexts
● Thinking affects behaviour
● Wants to ‘open the black box’; wants to use thinking to discover a different
understanding of behaviour

● Psychoanalysis
● Freud and Jung
● Aim: uncover internal processes we are unaware of; the UNCONSCIOUS (sex
and aggression)
● Freud was all about the unconscious; things going on in your mind that you don’t
know about; decisions you thought you made but your unconscious actually did