Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I. PSYCHOLOGY’S ROOTS
a. People came on to earth. Soon after they became interested in themselves and in others. They
wondered, “Who are we? From where came our thoughts? Our feelings? Our actions?” And
how do we understand – and master and mange the people around us.
b. Psychologies answered to these wonderings have developed from international roots in
philosophy and biology into a science that aims to describe and explain how we think, feel, and
act. Understanding roots of today’s psychology helps us appreciate psychologists varied
perspectives.
d. Daniel Dennet called Darwin’s views – natural selection – the principle that among the range of
inherited trait variations, those contributions to reproduction and survival will most likely be
passed on the succeeding generations.” He also passed on Darwin’s principle of revolution.
e. The debate of nurture versus nature still continues today.
VIII. PSYCHOLOGY’S PERSPECTIVE
a. Neuroscience: how the body & brain enable emotions, memories & sensory experiences.
b. Evolutionary: how the natural selection of traits promotes the perpetuation of one’s genes.
c. Behavior genetics: how our genes and our environment influence our individual differences.
d. Psychodynamic: how behavior springs from unconscious drives and conflicts.
e. Behavior: how we learn observable responses.
f. Cognitive: how we encode, process, store, and retrieve information.
g. How Behavior and thinking vary across situations and cultures.
a- Some psychologists conduct basic research (pure science that aims to increase the
scientific knowledge base) that builds psychology’s knowledge base.
c. Clinical psychologists: study, assess, and treat people with psychological disorders.
d. Psychiatry: a branch of medicine dealing with psychological disorders; practiced by physicians
who sometimes provide medical treatment as well as psychological therapy.
e. Psychohistory (psychological analysis of historical characters): psycholinguistics (study of
language and thinking).
XVI. CORRELATION
a-The correlation coefficient is a statistical measure of the extent to which two factors
vary together, and thus of how well either factor predicts the other.
c. Scatter plot a graphed cluster of dots, each of which represents the values of two variables. The
slope of the points suggests the direction of the relationship between the two variables. The
slope of the points suggests the direction of the relationship between the two variables. The
amount of scatter suggests the strength of correlation. (Little scatter indicates high correlation).
a- Correlations make visible the relationships that we might otherwise miss. They also
restrain our “seeing” relationships that actually do not exist.
XVII. EXPERIMENTATION
a- Experiment is a research method in which an investigator manipulates one or more
factors (independent variables) to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process (the
dependent variable). By random assignment of participants, the experiment controls other
relevant factors.