The Basics of

Psychology
The Origins of the field of Psychology

Shamanic Tradition

Philosophies explaining the nature of

reality
The field of psychology has been artistic
and thematic for most of it’s existence
 A major principle underscoring
psychological concepts is that they are
goal-directed teleological structures

“All of our behaviours, thoughts and motivations stem

from goals that we have set ourselves”
For a long time, it was believed that we were born as “Tabula Rasa”, a
clean slate upon which thoughts and behaviours were imprinted
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung challenged this notion, claiming that
there were deep seated ancestral and biological forces spurring us

These were the first hints of the possibility of psychology

developing into a scientific discipline
One of the biggest criticisms of it has
been that it is unscientific
 What does it mean for a field to be
scientific?

How does the field of psychology fail to

meet those standards?
 A systematically organized body of
knowledge

Rationality Creativity Evidence

Replicability Empirical Falsifiable

What is imagination?
The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or
concepts of objects and experiences not present to the
senses
The major difference between something being nonsensical
and something being creative is the aspect of reasonability
What is logic?
Reasoning conducted or assessed according to
strict principles of validity.
Science becomes a collection of reasonable ideas that have
been tested and reasonable ideas that we can’t test yet
 Motivations that stem Motivations that
from biology, genetics and stem from future
ancestry goals

Ideas that have been Ideas that have been

Psychology as a
tested formulated
Scientific Discipline

Behaviourism, Humanism, Existentialism,

Evolutionary Psychology Psychoanalysis
The continuum of
reasonability

Logic Imagination
How did reasonability originate in humans?
Logic and imagination are two sides of the same coin
 Boole (1848) and Frege (1879) formalized logic in such a
way that it became possible to see how logical operations
could be carried out mechanically, automatically, and
hence through purely physical causation, without the need
for an animate interpretive intelligence to carry out the
steps. This raised the irresistible theoretical possibility that
not only logic but other mental phenomena such as goals
and learning also consisted of formal relationships
embodied non-vitalistically in physical processes
Logic is embedded in physical nature and the mental
aspects of it are mere interpretations of a physical
phenomena
“Why is survival the fundamental motive of all living
organisms?”
 The origin of evolutionary mechanisms

Things that existed for longer periods of time could influence the
environment more than things that ceased to exist immediately

Through a constant, repetitive reinforcement, survival slowly became

the focus of mutation
The biological mechanisms of organisms refined themselves
over millions of years

Complex, refined structures with specific roles became

commonplace

(digestive organs, hormones etc)

 What about consciousness? When did that develop?

What is the difference between a conscious and a non-conscious

being?
 Sensory systems complexified in this time-
period too

Organisms began to perceive their environments with

more detail

Simple consciousness developed as organisms

gained object permanence

As animals tried to gauge the probabilities of prey/predator movement,

they developed imagination and creativity
 Emergent Properties

Consciousness

Society

Eusociality

The highest level of organization of sociality, is defined by the

following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including care of
offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a
colony of adults, and a division of labour into reproductive and non-
reproductive groups
 The Neocortex

Attention, working memory, reasoning

Cognition

Heuristics

A simple cognitive short-cut that attaches two propositions

to form a meaningful assumption
What are emotions?
 Motivational domains

Values could not only be derived from the environment

There is no intrinsic response across all species related to an

environmental factor

Different species react differently to the same stimulus and so do different

individuals within the same species
Programs that are designed to solve one
adaptive problem can interfere with the
functioning of another program
 A super-ordinate program is required that can regulate which
programs are activated and which ones are inhibited in specific
situations
Emotions are the super-ordinate system that helps an organism
decide which programs to supress and which ones to enable
Fear
Go o
d exp
Go o erien
d exp ces w
erien ith s
ces w n akes
ith s
n akes

Bad experience
with snakes

Instinctual
valuation of
snakes
Time

Value systems recalibrate based on individual experiences, but

baseline instinctual conceptions are more readily accessible than
learned ones
The cognitive-evaluative mechanism of
categorizing good and evil

Locate a key-threat

Encode an array of fitness

damaging events in memory

Motivates action using bodily functions

 Criteria for creating an emotion

1. The situation had to recur ancestrally

2. Could not be negotiated successfully unless there were superordinate programs to help

3. Had rich and reliable repeated structures

4. Had recognizable cues signalling their presence

5. Would incur very high fitness costs

 Emotions also act as recalibration
engines of the long term

They reassign values and expectations as per the

individuals experience

Unique mechanism that helps the individual specifically

 Uncertainty

Error management theory

 Negative Trait Bias

The tendency of people to recognize stimuli with implications of

negativity faster than stimuli that might be positive

Traumatic events further antagonize the individual and bias

them even further towards creating more negative heuristics

The individual is generally reacting to a situation rather than

acting to create or cause the situation
 All cognition was still focused on aiding survival

Emotional responses developed as more complex pleasure-

seeking and pain-avoiding mechanisms

The development of emotions and cognitions enabled

animals to form social groups
 Perspectives in Psychology

Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic

Behavioural Perspective

Cognitive Perspective

Gestalt Perspective

Humanistic Perspective

Evolutionary Perspective