PSY- 112: Experimental

Psychology
UNIT- 1: UNDERSTANDING
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY.
 What is Experimental Psychology
• Experimental psychology is concerned with
testing theories of human thoughts, feelings,
actions, and beyond – any aspect of being
human that involves the mind
– Includes  behavioral psychology, cognitive
psychology
 Empiricism

Component
s of
Experimenta
l Psychology

Determinism Falsifiability
• Empiricism
– collection of data that can support or refute a
theory
– concerned with observations that can be tested
– based on the idea that all knowledge stems from
observations that can be perceived, and data
surrounding them can be collected to form
experiments
• Falsifiability
– Karl Popper, a 20th century philosopher, formalized this
concept
– that for any theory to be scientific there must be a way
to falsify it
– Science disconfirms
• 1) Its easy to find confirmation for theory if you are looking
for it
• 2) Confirmation should be counted if it comes from risky
predictions – something that could destroy your theory
• 3) Prohibitive – rules things out
– Every false believe we discover is actually good, because
that gets us that much closer to believing on true things
• Determinism
– refers to the notion that any event has a cause
before it
– brain responds to stimuli, and that these
responses can ultimately be predicted, given the
correct data
Other key components Verifiability

Predictability

Fairness
Other key components
replicable by
another researcher

Verifiability document their

methods and clearly
explain how their
Predictability experiment is
structured and why
it produces certain
results
Fairness
Other key components
Verifiability
enables to make
predictions about

Predictability future events

measure of the

Fairness
strength of the
theory
Other key components
all data must be
considered when
evaluating a
hypothesis
Verifiability
All data must be
accounted for, even
Predictability if they invalidate the
hypothesis

Fairness
SCOPE OF EXPERIMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY
 Scope of experimental psychology
• Scope of a field refers to the future a
particular career holds, how it is applied, its
value and importance in the society.
• Scope varies with culture, geography,
technological advancements and some other
factors.
• Areas covered in experimental psychology
– Psychophysics
– Animal psychology
– Learning psychology
– Psychology of individual differences
– Personality psychology
– Industrial psychology
– Clinical psychology
• Homework
– Find recent articles of trends in experimental
psychology
HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY
History of Experimental Psychology
• Beginnings of Modern Psychology
– Rene Descartes
– Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
– John Locke
• British Empiricism
– George Berkeley
– David Hume
– David Hartley
• Scottish and French Psychologies of the Eighteenth Century
• British Associationism
• German Psychology before 1850:
– Immanuel Kant
– Johann Friedrich Herbart
– Hermann Lotze
History of Experimental Psychology
• ORIGIN OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY WITHIN
PHILOSOPHY
– Aristotle
• soul is unitary, thus influencing Descartes
• declared that the soul is free
– deterministic psychology and in general supporting the philosophers against
the scientists who wished to tie the soul to the uniformities of nature
– tabula rasa, a blank tablet as yet unwritten on by experience, thus
supporting the school of empiricism, which began with Hobbes and Locke
• basic principles of memory
» similarity, contrast and contiguity
• 5 senses
– Rene´ Descartes
• physiological psychology of the reflex
• free insubstantial soul and a mechanically operated body
– he resolved the possible incompatibility of these two entities by
his dualism
» Matter and the body are extended substance
» soul is unextended substance
– two kinds of substance interact with each other in the human
organism, body affecting mind and mind body
– father of the mind-body theory of interactionism
• Body (‘pathway’ theory of the peripheral nervous system)
– Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood in 1628
– muscles operate in opposing pairs
– nerves are necessary for sensation and for movement
» hollow tubes conducting the animal spirits indifferently in
either direction
• Soul
– “all that is in us and which we can not conceive in any manner
possible to pertain to a body,” perceives and wills
– Perceptions and passions are primarily dependent upon the body,
but the soul knows them
• The interaction between the soul and the body occurs at
the pineal gland, the “conarium,” which is the only part of
the brain which is single, that is to say, the only part that is
not duplicated in the two halves
• brain seems to be the organ to which sensation proceeds
and where motion originates, he selected the only
unduplicated part of the brain as the point of interaction
• existence of innate ideas
– ideas which are not derivable from experience but which come to
the mind with such certainty and inevitability that their
acceptance is assured
• GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNITZ
– Leibnitz had a psychological view of the world and
thus heads a tradition of activity-psychology,
which has persisted mostly in Germany and
Austria, but also in England.
– Activity lies at the very base of the system:
• Substance is being, is capable of action
• Simple or Compound (collection of simple substances
called as monads)
• monad is the element of all being and partakes of its
nature, and being is activity
• Activity and consciousness are thus two words for the
same thing and lie at the bottom of nature
– Leibnitz’s monadology
• there is the psychological view of the universe
– consciousness does not explain or create matter.
Consciousness is matter, and matter consciousness
• activity as essential to substance
– most obvious thing about mind is its activity
• principle of unity
– A persistently, actively evolving mind is continuous and
therefore unitary
• degrees of consciousness
– Unconscious (petite perception)
• Psycho-physical parallelism
– The two (mind & body) are not causally related; they follow
parallel courses, and the resultant correlations appear as if
one caused the other
• JOHN LOCKE
– ideas are the units of mind
• “the object of thinking.”
• logical concepts
• Association of ideas
– The mind is capable of analysis into ideas
– Ideas, Locke thought, are not inborn; they come from
experience
– two sources of ideas
• sensation and reflection
• Sensation is the obvious source: by the senses, sensible qualities
are conveyed into the mind from external bodies and there
produce perceptions
• existence of reflection, which “might properly enough be called
internal sense
– doctrine of primary and secondary qualities
• primary qualities
– main avenue of contact between the mind and the external
world
• secondary qualities
– powers that the object possesses for producing ideas which
do not exist within the objects in the form in which they are
perceived
• Powers
– Objects have powers to affect other objects beside the organs
of sense, which are also objects
• British Empiricism:
– George Berkley
– David Hume
– David Hartley
• Scottish and French Psychologies
– Scottish School
– French Empiricism
– French Materialism
• British Associationism
– James Mill
– John Stuart Mill
– Alexander Bain
• German Psychology before 1850:
– Immanuel Kant
– Johann Friedrich Herbart
– Hermann Lotze
• IMMANUEL KANT
– Critique of Pure Reason (1781) & revised in 1787
– Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
– Critique of Judgment in (1790)
– effect of Kant upon psychology
• 1) He favored subjectivism, keeping alive the faith in
the importance of those mental phenomena which can
not be reduced to brain or body processes
• 2) he gave support to nativism in theories of space
because he subjectified space and time into a priori
intuitions, removing them from the objective external
world
– Nature of the intellect
• categories of the understanding
– unity, totality, reality, existence, necessity, reciprocity and
cause-and-effect (12 of them)
• space and time
– spatial arrangement of objects is given in perception
• Antinomies
– 1) space and time must be limited and yet they must also be
infinite
– 2) every substance must be resolvable into parts and yet some
substances must be ultimate and unresolvable into parts
– 3) freedom of action must occur along with caused action,
and yet all action is surely caused
• JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART
– ‘father’ of scientific pedagogy
– Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816)
– Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824-1825)
– Metaphysik (1828-1829)
– Herbart on Psychology
• Psychology is a science and it is grounded upon
experience, metaphysics and mathematics
– Psychology is science
– Psychology is empirical
» grounded upon experience
– Psychology is metaphysical
– Psychology is mathematical
– Is psychology analytical?
• The mind is unitary and can not be divided into parts.

– recognized the relation between mind and body

• three principles of connection
• 1) Bodily conditions may hinder the arousal of an idea
(e.g., in sleep): this is repression (Druck).
• 2) They may facilitate the arousal of an idea (e.g., in
intoxication or passion): this is reinforcement
(.Resonanz).
• 3) When the feelings or, through practice, the ideas
cause movement (e.g., in emotion or simple action),
there is cooperation between soul and body.
• HERMANN LOTZE
– Importance to Psychology
• 1) he published a ''medical psychology, or physiology of
the soul” in 1852, the first book claiming to be a
physiological psychology
• 2) theory of space, the foundation of the later
empiristic theories based on local signs
• 3) a philosopher with this interest in the new
physiological (medical) psychology
 THE FOUNDING OF EXPERIMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY
• Gustav Theodor Fechner
– His philosophical solution of the spiritual problem lay in
his affirmation of the identity of mind and matter and
in his assurance that the entire universe can be
regarded as readily from the point of view of its
consciousness, a view that he later called the
Tagesansicht, as it can be viewed as inert matter, the
Nachtansicht.
– “the relative increase of bodily energy the measure of
the increase of the corresponding mental intensity”
 • arithmetic series of mental intensities might correspond
to a geometric series of physical energies, that a given
absolute increase of intensity might depend upon the
ratio of the increase of bodily force to the total force
– Lead to the formulation of program of Psychophysics
• three psychophysical methods
– Method of limits
– Method of constant stimuli
– Method of average error
• The classical experiments on lifted weights, on visual
brightnesses and on tactual and visual distances
– 1860, Elemente der Psychophysik
• text of the “exact science of the functional relations or
relations of dependency between body and mind.”
– Contributions
• Fact of the ‘limen’
• Weber's law
• experimental method
• Fechner’s clear conception of the nature of
psychophysics as “an exact science of the functional
relations or the relations of dependency between body
and mind.’’
• Fechner’s very wise conclusion that he could not
attempt the entire program of psychophysics and that
he would therefore limit himself, not only to sensation,
but further to the intensity of sensation
• Hermann von Helmholtz
– first scientific contribution of importance while at
Konigsberg was the measurement of the rate of
conduction of the nervous impulse
– investigation of the physical physiology of sensation –
Optik
• appeared in three parts in 1856, i860 and 1866, and that it was
then issued as a whole in 1867
– Tonempfindungen
• contains Helmholtz’s account of auditory stimuli and of Ohm’s
law of auditory analysis, his discus¬ sion of the anatomy of the
ear, the attendant resonance theory of hearing and the report of
Helmholtz’s researches on combination tones and on the nature
of vowel qualities
– Empiricism, Unconscious inferences, Perception
• Wilhelm Wundt
– Wundt’s system of psychology
• 1860s –
– Both the theory of perception and the distinction between
feeling and sensation were then founded upon the doctrine of
unconscious inference
• Physiologische Psychologies –
– doctrine of psychological compounding explicit
– “cognitive signs” enter into the theory of perception as
marking off the objective from the subjective
– Apperception appeared, but it was not yet very important
– Elementism
» introspective analysis meant the resolution of experience
into compounds of sensations or other elements like
them
• 1896
– tridimensional theory of feeling
– This is the view that feelings vary not only with respect to the
dimension of pleasantness-unpleasantness, but also,
simultaneously and independently, in respect of two other
dimensions, strain-relaxation and excitement-calm.
• fifth, edition of the Physiologische Psychologie (1902-
1903)
– presents the full argument for the new theory of feeling, and
it also marks the increased importance of apperception as a
systematic concept
• Contributions:
– Definition of psychology
– Problems of psychology
• (1) the analysis of conscious processes into elements,
• (2) the determination of the manner of connection of
these elements
• (3) the determination of their laws of connection
– Understanding mental processes
• Association
• Fusion
• Assimilation
• Complications
• Apperception
• William James
– Father of American Psychology
– Contributions:
• Pragmatism
– Pragmatism is rooted in the idea that philosophical topics,
such as knowledge, language, meaning, belief, and science,
are best understood in terms of their practical use
• Functionalism
– wholeness of an event, taking into the impact of the
environment on behavior
• James-Lange Theory of Emotion
– an event triggers a physiological reaction, which we then
interpret.
– According to this theory, emotions are caused by our
interpretations of these physiological reactions
CHARACTERISTICS OF
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Experiment
– an investigation in which a hypothesis is scientifically
tested
– an independent variable (the cause) is manipulated and
the dependent variable (the effect) is measured; any
extraneous variables are controlled

• Experimental method
– The experimental method involves the manipulation of
variables to establish cause and effect relationships
– This method relies on controlled methods, random
assignment and the manipulation of variables to test a
hypothesis
• Types of Experiment
– Lab Experiments
– Field Experiments
– Quasi-Experiments

• Key terms
– Independent variable
• variable is assumed to cause some type of effect on
another variable
– Dependent variable
• effect that the experimenter is measuring
– Operational definitions
• Experimental Process
– The scientific method is a set of procedures and
principles that guide how scientists develop
research questions, collect data and come to
conclusions.
– 4 Steps
• 1) Forming a Hypothesis
• 2) Designing a Study and Collecting Data
• 3) Analyzing the Data and Reaching Conclusions
• 4) Sharing the Findings
 Characteristics of Modern Science
• Scientific Mentality
– Assumption:
• Behaviour must follow a natural order, therefore, it can
be predicted
– Research psychologists share the belief that there
are specifiable causes for they way people behave
and that these causes can be discovered through
research
• Determinism
• Gathering Data
– Describe this systematic order?
• Collecting empirical data
– Data that are observable or experienced

• Seeking General Principles

– Organizing & cataloguing > proposing general
principles (laws or theories) that will explain the
observations
• Law = generality to apply to all situations
• Theory = understanding by devising and testing an
interim explanation
• Good thinking
– Approach – systematic, objective & rational

• Self correction
• Publicizing results
• Replication