Welcome back, folks. I hope your week is going well. I apologize for all the challenges we've had with Canvas and that I'm late getting this lecture up, but you still have time to watch it and complete your wowish wonder assignment. So, in this section, uh we're going to start talking about psychology. Initially, we're going to look at what psychology is, a definition, and its scope, and then we'll talk about contemporary perspectives in psychology. Your book talks about historical perspectives, and we're going to focus and contemporary. We're going to focus on contemporary perspectives. To begin with, I want you to think about what image comes to mind when you think about psychology. So, nothing fancy, just what's the first thing that comes to mind. For many people, a therapist sitting in a chair with the client on a couch is the kind of image that comes to mind. This is Freud. Freud is often someone who comes to mind. And certainly, therapy is a big part of psychology. However, it's not the largest part. Psychologists do a lot of different things. We do consulting, we teach and we do research. And the largest portion of the field is actually the academic side. The teaching and research um are bigger uh more common than therapy. Now I want you to think about how you would define psychology. If you've already read the chapter, then you know how the book defines it. Uh so maybe too late for you. If you haven't read that first chapter, how would you define psychology? What words would you use? Take a minute to think about that. You could pause the video if you need to and just write down some notes about how you would define psychology. For this class, we are defining psychology as the scientific study of behavior. Now, that may look really simple, but when we break it out, it's more complex than it looks. Now, your textbook defines it as a scientific science of mental processes and behavior. Those definitions are similar, but not exactly the same. So, when I disagree with the textbook, lecture trumps the text. This is the definition we'll be using. So when we look at this definition a little bit more closely, scientific is in there because we've chosen in psychology to use the scientific method. All sciences use the scientific method. So what is that? The scientific method involves gathering evidence to support a logical hypothesis. So a hypothesis is a guess about what might happen. So, I might have a hypothesis that men are more aggressive than women. Okay? I'm not just going to leave it at that. I'm going to go out and find evidence to see whether that's true or not. And empirical just means using our senses. So, we can look at things, we can hear things, we can smell things, we can taste things. There are a variety of different ways to gather evidence. In this situation, I might do an observation where I have men and women um in different situations and I see how aggressive the men are compared to how aggressive the women are. Now, the scientific method is not the only way to find truth. Truth can be discovered, for example, through discernment. If you're talking about religion or theology, u there are other methods. Philosophy uses logic. But the reason that we use the scientific method is that it goes beyond logic because human beings are not very good at logic. You may have found that out in a philosophy course. Uh we make lots of mistakes when we just use logic. And so we want to use evidence to back up or um disprove the logic that we're using. If our hypothesis are not supported by evidence, then we change our hypothesis. There are some areas scientific method doesn't work for. In theology, you can't test anything. We can't um question whether God exists or not and test it with scientific method. we're not going to find evidence. So in theology, discernment is often used to figure out truth. So different fields use different methods. Now the definition or the definition we're using is a scientific study of behavior. You might have come up with something like uh thinking, feeling, and behaving or the way our book uses mental processes and behavior. That kind of approach assumes that behavior is just actions, things that you can see. But for this definition, behavior is more than just actions. We behave in a variety of ways. We behave with actions, things that other people can see. We behave with our thoughts. Just thinking is a behavior. And we behave with our feelings. Feelings are behavior. This is generally for contemporary psychologists. uh especially research psychologists look at it this way. So for us behavior consists of observable behavior, thoughts and feelings u and feelings all three. Now some of you might have put human in your definition but psychologists don't just study humans. We also study animals, insects, anything that moves. If if rocks moved, we would study rocks. So, we don't want human in here to limit what it is we study. One of my favorite studies used cockroaches. I'm glad I didn't have to run it, but it's still a kind of cool study. So, those of you who have performed in sports or performed with music or dance or some other type of performance, ask yourself, do you perform better with an audience or without an audience? Now, research only looks at the average or what happens with most people. So, this might not be true for you, but research shows that if you're well practiced and ready for the performance, you perform better with an audience than without. So, the study with roaches looked to see whether roaches do the same thing human beings do. So, how basic is this um tendency to perform better with an audience? Does it go all the way back to insects, which are really basic animals, or is it something that developed later? So, when they looked at roaches, they put they taught roaches to run a maze to get to food so they could run it quickly. And then in one condition, they had the roaches running the maze with a clear plastic divider that separated them from other roaches, so the other roaches could see them run the maze. and they actually ran the maze faster when they had that roach audience than if they were running it by themselves. Now, take a moment and ask yourself, did that demonstrate that roaches are affected by an audience the same way human beings are, or is there another way to explain it? Give yourself a moment. Pause the video if you need to. What many of my students come up with when I ask them this question and what I personally believe is that the roaches don't understand what that plastic barrier is. They just know they can see the other roaches and so they're going to get to that food as fast as they can because they want to beat the other roaches to it. So that's my interpretation. If it was yours, good job. You might have even had another interpretation. I want you to remember this and remember that you are capable of thinking about research, critiquing it, and coming up with other ways to understand it. You don't need to be intimidated by research results. Research is not perfect, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. All research has flaws, and you are absolutely capable of catching those flaws and challenging research results. I want you to keep that thinking hat on all semester. Something to keep in mind is that we are all lay psychologists. What I mean by that is we use psychology every single day and we act like researchers when we do that. So what do I mean? We regularly regularly observe behavior, our behavior and other people's behavior. We're watching people all the time and we're watching ourselves all the time. When we see other people do things or when we watch ourselves do things, we sometimes ask ourselves, why did they do that or why did I do that? We're curious about people's motivations and even our own motivations and then we come up with an answer. So, we generate one or more answers to that question. Our world view informs those answers. So the way we look at the world is going to influence how we answer questions about why people do what they do. And there's no right or wrong here. It's just different opinions. So for example, many years ago when my kids were little, they were in preschool. We had a neighbor whose kid was in the same preschool. So we decided to carpool. Well, the first day we were car pooling, the mom brought her son over to our house because we were driving. And when she put her son into the car, I was amazed. This kid is 2 or 3 years old and he started just trashing his mother with language that no two or threeyear-old should be familiar with. Just went on and on and on saying the nastiest, meanest things to his mom. And his mom did nothing. Now, you'll learn later that doing nothing when people are behaving badly c is a way to get rid of it. But that was not the impression I got. I felt like she was kind of beat down. And what I asked myself was why is he doing that? And then where did he learn this from? And I assume that he's learning this from other adults in the household. This was a household with three generations. So, the kid, the parents, and the grandparents. And I think this woman was getting a lot of harassment and verbal abuse uh in that house. And this kid was picking up on it and copying it. So, I was very concerned about her. I should have called social services, but I did. I didn't because I was busy. But that's an example of asking yourself why someone's behaving the way they are and coming up with an answer. So my answer was that this kid learned this at home. You're all you do this every day all the time. And I want you to start paying attention to when you're asking yourself why did they do that? Why did I do that? And the kind of answers you come up with. Your answers might be kind of consistent. You might have one or two approaches. So, it might all be, "Oh, they learned that at home. Oh, they um were thinking something that led to that behavior or something else." You might be kind of consistent. You might have one or two favorite ways of explaining behavior. You might explain your own behavior and the behavior of people close to you differently than you explain strangers behaviors. But start paying attention. If you keep a journal, that's a good place to start making notes or just in your notebooks or your computer files. Just start making some notes when you catch yourself asking about people's behavior, yours or someone else's, and the kind of answers you come up with. Is there a pattern there? A little bit later, we're going to I'll talk about why that matters. um your ways of explaining behavior might fit with some of the perspectives in psychology and knowing that can help you in this course. So start paying attention, start writing down some notes about what you're doing. Now over time we might revise our opinions about why people do do what they do or have did what they did. For example, in a first impression, and first impressions are powerful, you might think that somebody is kind of a jerk and then you get to know them over time and you realize actually they're a really nice person. They were just really nervous in that interaction. So, you had an original um explanation for their behavior and then you change it after you get to know them better. That's absolutely normal as well. Okay, before we get into the contemporary perspectives, I want to look at some basic issues in psychology that come up over and over again. The first is determinism versus free will. Determinism is that everything has a cause that can be predicted. Free will doesn't exist. Free will is the idea that we have at least some choice in our behavior. Now it feels like we are choosing our behavior from moment to moment. However, often our environments are having an influence, our friends are having an influence. Um the mood we're in has an influence. A lot of different things have an influence that actually can make us lean a little bit toward determinism when we learn more about those impacts. But there's no, again, no right or wrong here. This is a continuum. So, do you believe that everybody has complete free will? Do you believe that everything is determined? Or are you somewhere in the middle? Figure out kind of if you're at one extreme, if you're like right smack in the middle or a little bit closer to determinism or a little bit closer to free will. Try to identify what where you stand on this issue. Another issue is functionalism versus structuralism. Functionalism is the belief that all psychological um structures are there for a reason. All psychological experiences are there for a reason. They help us with something. They're functional. They serve some purpose. Structuralism is the ide is just studying psychological structures for themselves because you're interested in them. So you might study memory or language or thinking or personality or a variety of different things. Not because you think they are there to accomplish something, but just because they're interesting in and of themselves. So let me give you an example of this. I've struggled with depression for since from high school until um fairly recently. And when I would get really stressed and I would have a ton of stuff on my plate that I needed to get done and depression hit, I would get really frustrated because the depression made it really hard to get anything done. And if anything, I needed to get more done in less time. And being frozen in that depressive state where I can't find any motivation, can't get anything done just made everything worse. And so I would ask myself, what function does depression serve? It's just getting in my way. So I was thinking from a functionalist perspective there. Okay. Nature versus nurture. Nature is the idea that our behavior is caused by things within our body by evolution. Um everything from nature is um things that we were born with or how our body has changed. Uh so our behavior might be because of our genetics. It might be because of evolution. It might be because we're sick. It might be because we're overt tired. um it might be because of an illness we have. So nature is saying that our behavior is entirely caused by something biological or evolutionary. Nurture on the other hand is the idea that our behavior is controlled by our environment. And so our our physical state and evolution is not relevant. Of course these are two extreme positions. You can be somewhere in the middle. And psychology today generally believes that most psychologists believe that nature and nurture interact. So the idea of pure nature is that it doesn't matter what your genetics are. It doesn't matter what evolution says. It doesn't matter the state of your body. The environment is going to determine your behavior. How you were raised, what situation you're in, who's around you. All of that stuff is what's most important. for them to interact, for nature and nurture to interact is the idea that I am not going to become a tennis pro. I could spend I could have spent my life in lessons from two years old playing tennis and I would never become a tennis pro because I have really bad hand eye coordination. My eyes don't work together, which makes three-dimensional um depth perception difficult for me to see. I don't certainly have the genetics that would predispose me to being a great athlete. And so, while I could learn to play tennis and I could improve my tennis playing, uh which is the nurture part, I'm never going to become a great tennis player. So my innate ability or lack of ability and physical challenges are going to limit what nurture can do. On the other hand, Beethoven probably would have become a an amazing musician just because of his predisposition for it. But if he never encountered a piano, he may never have become who we know him to be now. So he had to encounter musical instruments and that's the nurture. That's part of his environment in order to become the amazing composer he was. So he had incredible predisposition for this, but then also he had the right environment for it. Okay, let's get to contemporary perspectives in psychology. So, there are seven perspectives in psychology. Each of these are different ways of explaining what causes behavior. If you ask 10 different psychologists what causes child abuse, for example, you may get 10 different answers. Not because they're all wrong or that nine of them are wrong and one is right, but because there are different ways of explaining behavior and different psychologists have these different perspectives. So, we're going to go through each one of these. There's only six here, but there is a seventh we will get to. We're going to go through each one of these and I'm going to tell you a little bit about it, give you some examples for each one. and I'm going to apply it to depression and altruism. Depression you probably already know something about or a little bit about. Altruism you may not be familiar with. Altruism is a word that means selfless um selfless doing for others. So if you run into a burning building to save a child, so you're risking your life to save that child. You're not expecting any kind of award or ceremony or anything. you just want to save that child. That is altruistic behavior. So altruistic behavior is doing something good for other people without any anticipated gain for yourself. And you might even be risking your life to do it or risking something to do it. So for each of these, we're going to look at how they might explain depression and how they might explain altruism. I have an image for each of these to help you remember what they are. or if those images are distracting, ignore them. I also have a song for each one to help you remember what they are. I can't play a clip of each song, which is what I would like to do because the recording feature in PowerPoint won't let me do that, but you can look them up if you like, or you might know them and be able to play the lyrics in your head, in your mind. Okay, let's get started. Oh, the perspectives are psychoanalytic, psychonamic. Now, I use these two interchangeably. Uh, if you go to grad school, you'll find out there is a difference between the two, but for our purposes, they're the same thing. So, if I say psychoanalytic or if I say psychonamic, I'm talking about the same thing. behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, physiological or biological and socioultural. So we're going to go through each of these individually. Let's start with psychoanalytic. So from the psychoanalytic or psychonamic perspective, I have this image of a woman whose head is locked up or her brain is locked up. From this perspective, we don't actually know why we do the things we do. We think we know, but we don't because what's causing our behavior is unconscious needs. So unconscious means we're not aware of them. And we have, according to psychonamic folks, we have these needs that are unconscious that actually drive all of our behavior. The psychonamic folks look at us like wild animals that are living in a civilized environment. And so like any wild animal, we have instincts or unconscious needs for food, for water, for sleep, uh for aggression, and for um sorry I'm blanking um for a variety of other needs for sex for a variety of other needs that we are largely unaware of. And so if you imagine you're at a um buffet, uh you pick small amounts of things and try to be reasonable about it. You're not going to pile your plate this high, right? But how would a lion respond to a buffet? A lion would not collect silverware and a napkin and a plate and very respectfully, civily, politely put little bits of food on their plate, right? A lion would just attack the buffet and start eating all of it. So, according to the psychonamic perspective, that's what we want to do. And you may have felt this way from time to time. We want to eat everything. We want to eat it now. We want to just go to town, forget about manners, just shove it all in our face. Now, according to psychonamic, we have learned to behave appropriately in public with food. And that's why we are so polite at a buffet. But that's not what we really want to do. Deep down in our unconscious, we are wanting to just shove it all in our face because that is the kind of anim animalistic nature of who we are. We're mammals and we have a lot in common with other mammals. Similarly, if we're attracted to somebody, we tend to play all kinds of games, right? Oh, go ask him if he likes me. Um, we might uh we go through a whole courting ritual. It's not as formal as it used to be, but we still go through kind of a cording ritual with each other. But according to the psychonamic folks, what we really want is to just jump their bones right here and now in public. We've learned not to do that. We've learned that's not appropriate and so we don't. But according to the psychonamic folks, that's what's actually driving our behavior. But we are animals who have encountered a civilization. And that civilization tells us you have to behave this way and this way and this way. and only these behaviors are acceptable. So, we've learned to kind of tame that anim animalistic instinct and channel it through appropriate uh ways, appropriate behaviors. If you've ever asked yourself, what are they really up to? What is she really up to? You're being a little suspicious because you don't trust the behavior on its surface. So, somebody you don't know comes up to you and starts acting really, really friendly, overly friendly, and you might wonder, "What are they up to? Are they going to try to sell me something? What's going on?" Right? So, if you're suspicious about alternative or ulterior motives, you're thinking like someone who's psychonamic. You don't take that behavior at face value. You wonder what's underneath that behavior. what's really driving it. The song I associate with this is Suspicion by Elvis Presley. Uh he's talking a lot about being suspicious of the person he is seeing. Uh not trusting her, not knowing whether she's uh cheating on him or whether everything's okay. Now, for an example of how this approach would deal with or would explain depression, one psychonamic explanation of depression is that we get angry, but it's not acceptable frequently to take that anger out on the person we're mad at. Or maybe we're angry at something amorphous that we can't take our anger out at. So if we're angry at the government, there's no way to express our anger to the government. So we have anger that we can't express to the target or the the target of that anger. And so one of the things that happens is we push it down inside. We suppress it. And if we suppress a lot of anger according to the psychonamic perspective, that turns into depression. So it's our un when we suppress the anger it becomes unconscious. is that unconscious anger that kind of eats away at us and creates depression. Now, how would they explain altruism? They would explain altruism. Well, this is kind of odd for psychonamic. Psychonamic folks have an answer to everything. You can't win with them. Um, if you're doing something good because they think we're animalistic and animals don't just do something good for the because it's good, right? Although we're starting to get some evidence that they actually do, but assuming that animals don't do something good just because it's good, they're looking for something negative inside of us that would explain why we're doing something good. We can't ever do something good and just be happy that we did it out of the goodness of our hearts. So for the psychonamic folks, if I'm doing something really good, it's because I really want the opposite. Let me say that again. If I'm doing something really good, it's because I want the opposite, which is really kind of strange. So the idea is if I am donating a lot of money to charity that would be considered good right psychonamic folks would say no you're donating this money to charity because deep down you are really greedy and you want all the money in the world but you feel bad about that because of the civilization you were raised in tells you you're not supposed to be greedy and so because you feel bad about being greedy you overcome compensate by giving more money to charity than you would otherwise. So again, that greediness is largely unconscious. And so you're not aware that the greediness is causing this behavior. Now, I'm not saying this is right, just that this is how psychonamic folks or psychoanalytic folks would explain these behaviors. The psychologist who is most associated with psychonamic or psychoanalytic psychology is Sigman Freud who you've probably heard of. He was the father of psychonamics. Okay, let's look at the behavioral perspective. In this example, I have the picture of a woman chasing after a a business woman chasing after a carrot. So, what's a carrot? This is a symbol for a reward. So she is constantly chasing after this carrot uh because she's trying to get more and more rewards. So the behavioral perspective is all about behavioral shaping. So from their perspective, we shape people's behavior by rewarding them for things we want them to do and possibly punishing them or ignoring them for things we don't want them to do. The original psychologists who came up with these perspectives or this perspective was John B. Watson and BF Skinner. You'll read more about them in your textbook. And when we get to this chapter, you'll learn a whole lot more about this. But the idea is that we were trained like the way we train dogs. We were trained to act the way we act. And so if you ask yourself, who taught them that? who taught him that? Who taught her that? You're asking about behavior from a behavioral perspective. You assume that they were taught this behavior. So, at home, this is how they were raised or a friend taught them to smoke pot or whatever is going on. You ask yourself, who taught them that? Just like I was asking about that little boy, where did he learn this from? I was looking at it from a behavioral perspective. Now if we look at depression and altruism, from a behavioral perspective, you can be trained to feel depressed. You can be trained to experience depression. So my mother was emotionally abusive, verbally abusive. And anytime I was happy, she would pop my balloon. Anytime I was happy, she would find a way to say something that would completely blow it. And which so I was basically getting punished for being happy. And whenever I felt bad, whether it was physical or emotional, mostly physical, if I felt sick, she was an amazing mom. She would make me my favorite food. She would sit by my bed and be very loving and warm. She liked that role of taking care of me when I was sick. So that led me to be sick more often and it also extended to feeling bad. Um so I was being rewarded for feeling bad and punished for feeling good. So from the behavioral perspective, you can train somebody to become depressed. You can also train somebody to be altruistic. So if you grow up in a family where altruism is a really highly valued characteristic and every weekend your family goes out and they feed the homeless or they clean up the highway or they do something good every single weekend as a family because they seriously believe in service and helping other people. And they're also the people in the neighborhood that take care of everybody. They're looking out for everybody. When somebody's sick, they bring them food. When someone died, they bring them food. They offer to drive people places. You know the kind of family I'm talking about. Really amazing, right? They value altruism. So, you were taught altruism if you grew up in a family like that. The song I associate with this is The Greatest Reward by Selene Dion. Okay. Okay, the humanistic perspective from the human I have a picture here of a plant growing in the palm of this person's hand because from a humanistic perspective we are born with absolutely everything we need inside of us. Just like an egg has everything the chick needs, we are born with everything we need. And so from the humanist perspective, we know what the best answers to our problems are. We know what we need to do. We may not be in touch with that information, but we have it. We know what's good for us. And what's good for one person isn't necessarily good for another person. So each of us comes equipped with everything we need. So we know how to take care of ourselves. We know how to nurture ourselves. We know how to make good decisions even if we might have lost contact with that. This is kind of like the um the Bible verse about uh the mustard seed where it was thrown if it's thrown on barren grounds, it won't blossom, but if it's thrown in fertile ground, it will. So, the seed has everything it needs except the right environment. So the seed needs fertile ground to grow and flourish. Human beings also need fertile ground to grow and flourish. So we have everything we need inside of us, but we need to be in a nurturing emotional environment. If we're in a nurturing emotional environment, then we will flourish as human beings. The early psychologists who came up with the humanistic perspective were Abraham Maslo and Carl Rogers who you will learn more about later. The song I associate with this is All You Need Is Love by the Beatles. The thing is it's not really love that we need. Love is great, but what we really need is unconditional regard. That's a technical term from the humanists. Unconditional regard means that you are accepting the person, respecting the person no matter what their behaviors are. So if some if you recognize the dignity of human beings and believe that every single human being is worthy, whether that's because they were created by God or some other reason. If you believe that every single human being is worth respecting and has innate dignity, then you're taking a humanistic perspective. This is a very hard thing to do. And if you have somebody in your life who gives this to you, you are very fortunate and you should appreciate it. My favorite example of this is the mother of a murderer. The murderer is on death row and yet she doesn't condone their actions, but that doesn't stop her from supporting them and doing everything they can to respect and support their child. If um similarly, if a a mother learns that their child committed a crime, they're not going to condone the crime. They're going to try to get the child to go turn themselves in, but they're also going to be there supporting them, and they're not going to think worse of them because of their behavior. They separate out the behavior from the person. Again, that's really hard to do. Think about how you treat your friends and your family. Are you able to separate the separate out the behavior from the person or when they do something you don't like? Is it so intertwined with the person that you now can't stand the person even if it's temporary? To be humanist, you need to be able to separate out the person from the behavior. See the behavior as something they do and not who they are. An example of how the humanists would explain depression, pretty much anything negative, they would say you didn't have the nurturing environment you needed or your environment was not nurturing emotionally nurturing enough or there were hurdles that you had to overcome in your emotional environment. So there's something about the emotional envir environment that's not ideal and that's what led to depression. The way they would explain altruism is that it's the natural outgrowth of becoming the best you can be. Humanists um the the phrase I think one of the branches of the military uses that they in ads they say be the best you can be. That's kind of a humanist argument or a humanist um saying. Humanists believe that if you're in the appropriate nurturing emotional environment, you will grow. You will blossom. You will become everything you are capable of. All of your innate abilities and talents and uh everything about you will come out. It will be it will find a way to be expressed. if you have that right supportive environment. And so altruism is kind of one of the ultimate accomplishments of that growth. Okay, the cognitive perspective. Here I have a picture of a light bulb going on over this woman's mind which is an idea indicates an idea. And um what was I thinking by Christine Lavin is the song because the cognitive perspective is all about thinking memory language. Um it's all about these mental processes uh that we engage in basic mental processes that we engage in. So thinking is one piece of it, but language and memories are also parts of this. It's how we process information. If you think about us like a computer, there's input to a computer, there's output from a computer, and in the middle, it's processing information. So this is the part of us that is processing information. That's what the cognitive perspective is interested in. So if you've ever asked yourself, what was I thinking? You're taking a cognitive perspective because you're assuming that your thinking causes your behavior. You might also ask, you know, what memory was triggering that behavior? Or does the native language someone speaks influence how they think or how they behave? So those are all questions from a cognitive perspective. Early cognitive psychologists were Mary Caukins who was the president of APA in 1905 back when women generally weren't involved in academics. She did research on memory and Alfred Benet uh was the developed the first intelligence test. And when I said Mary was uh president of APA that's our professional one of our professional organizations, the one that's been around the longest, the American Psychological Association. So if we look at how cognitive psychologists would explain depression, they would say it's irrational thinking. So that example I gave in the first lecture of assuming that if you get a poor grade on a test, all these domino effects are going to happen and your life's over basically. That's one kind of irrational thinking. There are a lot of types of irrational thinking. One is one of the things that happens is negative selft talk. So I lock my keys in my car for the millionth time and I start beating myself up. It's like oh I can't believe I did that again. I do that all the time. What why am I not paying attention to what I'm doing? So negative self-t talk like that can lead to depression. Irrational thinking where you take one thing and you blow it up into a much bigger deal can contribute to depression. And there are other types of irrational thinking that also have an impact. So cognitive folks would say irrational thinking leads to depression. You need to pay attention to your thinking and correct those thoughts that are not rational and get back in touch with reality. They would explain altruism by beliefs that you may have related to altruism. So if you believe that being altruistic is an important part of being a human being, if you believe that being altruistic is one of the highest things or most valuable things you can do. If you believe that life is more important than anything else and so anything you can do to preserve life is really important. Um those kinds of beliefs a cognitive psychologist would say lead to altruistic behaviors. because your beliefs are going to lead to the behaviors you express. Okay. The physiological perspective or biological perspective. I have a picture of a microscope for you because we tend to be looking at um genes and viruses and you know variety of things small things in our body. It's not all small things, but the microscope is used by biologists. The song I have is We're All on Drugs by Weezer. If you've ever asked yourself, "What drug are they on?" because of odd behavior, you are thinking from a physiological perspective. You're assuming it's something in that person's body that's influencing their behavior. It could be drugs. It could be exhaustion. If you think about how you behave around finals week when you haven't had enough sleep and you're really stressed, you might be snapping at people. You might be irritable and that's because of your physical state. So that's a physiological perspective. Some people ask um whether evolution influences behavior and that's also a physiological perspective. Some people believe that our genes determine our life or that our sex determines our life. So, some folks who are kind of stuck in the 1950s believe that women need to be in the kitchen and raising children and um that's all they're good to do and they should let their partners their husbands because you wouldn't have any other kind of partner. They should let their husbands do all the thinking for them. So, their husband should be voting, their husband should be running things, their husband should be in charge, and the little woman should just be going along with that. Um, that's the idea that our sex determines our role in life. And there's the same idea out there with your race or your ethnicity determines your role in life. So back in the 50s it was believed by a lot of people, not everybody certainly, but by a lot of white folks that only white folks should be in charge, that white folks should be running the world, and that people of color have no business getting involved in anything high level and should only be involved in sports and music and physical labor. Now, I'm not saying any of that is right. It's just the way things were back then. And there are still some people who feel this way unfortunately. So that's the idea that our genes um determine our behavior. It turns out that race and ethnicity are not coded in our genes. There is a socially constructed idea. Uh we aren't actually different races. We are all members of the human race. But if you believe or if you look at someone's behavior and say, "Is that because of is that because she's a woman?" Um, how many times have we blamed behavior on being male? I can't stand it when parents say, "Oh, boys will be boys." And don't try to do anything about inappropriate male behavior in their children. Uh, so anytime you're saying, "Oh, she's doing that because she's female. He's doing that because he's male. she's doing that because she's gay. Uh, she's doing that because she's white. Anytime you're making that kind of assumption, you're thinking from the physiological perspective. You also might think, oh, you know, she's having hallucinations because she has a fever of 103, right? Or she's acting crazy because um she is so highly stressed. Those are all ways of explaining things from a physiological or biological perspective. An early psychologist in this perspective is Michael Gazanaga. You will be learning more from him later. He's the person who studied or discovered that there's a difference between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It's not as those differences are not as extreme as you hear about in modern culture. people have taken that and run with it. Uh but we'll talk about that later. Now, how would the physiological folks explain depression? They would say there's something in your body causing that depression. So, one explanation of depression is a lack of serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter in the brain. It's an important chemical. And one explanation of depression is that we don't have enough serotonin in our brain when we're depressed. And so taking anti-depressants tries to even out um increase that level of serotonin to the point that we're much more functional and more comfortable. And how would they explain altruism? They would probably say that you have a genetic predisposition for altruism. So if we look back at your family tree, everybody in your family was probably altruistic. And you know, going back to your great great great grandparents, that whole family line has been super altruistic. And it's not because you learn it in your family. It's because you have the genetic predisposition to altruism. So it's been passed down genetically from generation to generation to generation. And that's why you are altruistic. The last perspective is the socioultural perspective. And with this perspective, our socioultural environment determines our behavior. So the society we live in, the country we live in, the neighborhood we live in, our culture, our race, ethnicity, gender. Now, this sounds a lot like the physiological, but it's not looking at it from a biological perspective. It's looking at it from a cultural perspective. Um, so this image of the male female symbols, um, is what I chose to represent this. And then True Player for Real by MC Lars is the song that I chose because he talks about where he came from and how that's had an impact on him. If you've ever thought, what planet is she from? What planet is he from? because somebody is acting oddly, you are thinking in a socioultural perspective. There's a feminist approach to psychology that fits under the socioultural perspective that explains depression and women or talks about depression in women basically as well why wouldn't women be depressed? We live in a sexist society with glass ceilings, where women make less than men for the same jobs, where women do the majority of the work at home, the domestic work at home, even when they're working full-time. There's a lot to be depressed about or at least frustrated. But if you're depressed, it's reasonable in this society to be depressed as a woman. A socioultural psychologist might explain altruism by saying you grew up in a culture where altruism is highly valued. So different cultures value different things. If you grew up in a culture or a neighborhood or a country where the there's a very high value placed on altruism, then you're likely to be altruistic. Paul Ecman was an early socioultural psychologist who studied uh did cross-cultural research looking at the expression of emotions and found out that facial expressions are the same everywhere for representing different emotions. So if someone looks happy, if they look sad, if they look frustrated, that face is the same face that you see anywhere in the world. What differs is when it's okay to express those emotions. So, different countries, different cultures have different ideas about how much you should smile, um about whether it's okay to express sadness or when it's okay to express sadness, that kind of thing. Okay. So here again we have psychonamic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, physiological, and socioultural. The psychonamic says that it's unconscious animalistic needs that drive our behavior. The behaviorists say that we learned our behavior. We were trained to behave this way. The humanists say that we are motivated to become everything we can be. And if we don't have sufficient nurturing emotional environment, we will be blocked in accomplishing that. Cognitives say that our information processes um information processing mechanisms determine our behavior. So our thinking, our beliefs, our memory, our language cause our behavior. The physiological folks say it's something about our biology, the state of our body or evolution and our genetics that determine our behavior. And the socioultural folks say, "No, it's our cultural environment that determines our behavior." So, here's an example where there are different explanations for violence. And I recommend you pause the video in a moment for this and ask yourself which of these examples match which perspectives. So if violence is caused by movies, TV and video games, what perspective is that coming from? If we say violence is caused by drug use, what perspective is that coming from? Etc. So take a moment, pause the video, and identify for yourself which perspective each of these explanations is coming from. So, I hope you paused your video and you wrote down what you think, which perspectives, what you think the perspectives match these explanations for. And I'm going to go through and tell you what I think they connect with. So, movies, TV, and video games, you are watching other people be violent or you're being violent yourself and being rewarded for it. So this would be a behaviorist perspective for drug use. This would be a physiological or biological explanation. Rejection by family and friends would be humanist. Inadequate intelligence would be cognitive. Buried emotions and frustrations. The buried refers to being unconscious would be psychonamic or psychoanalytic. And the erosion of societal moral values would be socioultural. If you didn't get all those right, go back and review and figure out why one of them was different from what I just gave you. Now, these are not easy. So, you might have gotten the impression up to now that, oh, yeah, these are straightforward. They're not actually that straightforward, and it takes a lot of practice to get the hang of this. So, be gentle with yourself if you didn't get them all right, but spend some time trying to figure it out if you didn't. Okay, there's one more perspective. I gave you six, but there's actually seven. I don't want you to forget this one when you're taking a test or taking quizzes because it's important. So, integrative is the last perspective. With the integrative perspective, you could be take, it's also called eclectic, you could be taking one or more of these four approaches. So if you think about a therapist, a therapist who has an integrated perspective could be looking at it as okay each case is unique. Each person who comes in my door is unique and I need to use the tools that I have that will best work with that patient. So if I have a patient who comes in who has absolutely no insight, I'm not going to use psychonamic tools because they require you to look at your behavior, to look at your childhood and figure out where those behaviors come from and make that connection and that requires insight and pretty sophisticated thinking. I probably also wouldn't use a cognitive perspective because with a cognitive perspective, you have to pay attention to your thoughts. You have to try to correct your thoughts. And again, that requires a lot of kind of internal work. And folks with who don't have a lot of insight aren't really good at looking inside themselves. But instead, I might recommend meds. I might uh look at how we could reward the behavior that person wants and discourage the behavior they don't want. That kind of thing. So we can look at other ways to approach the individual based on who they are. On the other hand, if I have somebody come in come in who loves to think and already has a lot of insight and loves to think about themselves and they know a lot about their behavior, but they only want to look at what's happening now. They think that, you know, childhood is not important. It's just what's going on in my life right now that matters. I would take a cognitive approach with them. Um so this is you treat each person as being unique and you tailor your approach to dealing with that person. Another integrative approach is to say okay we have research that says that different treatments work best for different disorders. So we know that cognitive behavioral therapy and medication either separately or combined the best is combined is the best approach for depression. So prescribing meds so that the person can be functioning well enough that they can get benefit from the therapy and then using cognitive behavioral therapy is the best treatment for depression. Uh the best treatment for schizophrenia is medication. Although some therapists are starting to do um therapy with with folks who have schizophrenia, traditionally meds have been the best appro most effective approach. So this is another way of being integrative and that is to understand the research on what treatments are best for what disorders and using the appropriate treatment for the for a particular disorder. Another approach is that different treatments work best for different clients personalities. So you may not see each client as being unique, but you see people with different personalities as being unique. and needing to tailor the approach you take to a particular type of personality. So, if you have somebody who's an extrovert versus someone who's a social uh an introvert, you might take different approaches with those two types of personalities. And then my preference is that multiple causes are responsible for any behavior. So, anything that's going on, especially anything that you want to change, probably has more than one cause. And that's one of the things that makes change so difficult. And so, if you're really going to help, you need to address as many of those causes as possible. So, let's take a look at that. For any particular behavior, your biology might contribute to it. The things you're thinking might contribute to it. The learning you've done, how you've been trained and raised might contribute to it. Your unconscious needs might be contributing to it. Your socioultural environment might be contributing to it. And your emotional environment might be contributing contributing to it. Now, it might be a subset of these, but very often any particular behavior has lots of different causes and they add up. So, let's look at an example. Oh, before we get to an example, okay, reality is even more complex than that. It's not just that these things influence the behavior. The behavior also has an impact going backwards. And these different things interact with each other. So, biology uh might influence your behavior, but your behavior might actually change your biology. So um your behavior can change your brain um your brain structure, the neurons in your brain, the chemicals in your brain and those chemicals in your brain can influence your behavior. So it can go both ways. The training you received could influence the thoughts in your head and the thoughts in your head could influence your biology and your biology could influence how well you learn something and whether you resist it or not. And all of those things can influence behavior and be influenced by behavior. So, it can get really, really complicated. Okay, here's an example. We're looking here at a young woman with depression. There is a chemical imbalance in her brain. She is low on serotonin. So, that is making her depressed. And then being depressed and acting depressed actually reduces might actually reduce the serotonin in her brain. So there's a cycle here um that gets worse and worse. She was rewarded w by her family for being humble, for being dependent and docel. She was punished anytime she expressed independence, pride um in herself or any kind of self-expression. So the way she was raised influences her or results in negative selft talk. So now as an adult if she tries to express independence or pride in herself or she tries to express herself through writing or through arts or through dance, her brain jumps in and says, "Oh no, no, no, no. That's not being humble. That's not being appropriate. You need to tamp that down. That negative selft talk lowers the serotonin in her brain. All three of these contribute to her depression and her depression increases her negative selft talk because the worse you feel when you're depressed the more negative everything looks and so you start beating yourself up. Her parents as you might expect based on how she was raised were hyperritical. They criticized everything she did. She could never do anything right. So that played into what she was being how she was being raised um and what she was rewarded and punished for. It influences her negative selft talk because she has the voice of her parents in her head for anything that she's doing saying that's not good enough and you shouldn't be doing that. So all those things are contributing to depression and feeding into each other. She experiences limitations in our society due to sexism and racism and those lead direct those fuel her depression directly and they're related to the way she was raised which may have even made her more aware of them. And then finally, she has a lot of frustrated needs that create unexpressable anger. So understandably, when she's limited in this way and when she's being criticized all the time and when she faces sexism and racism, she's going to have a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, and she's probably going to push it all down and suppress it because she was told to behave in a very narrowly defined good girl way. Now, these unconscious needs influence depression directly and these limitations contribute to how she was raised because her parents raised her in a society full of sexism and racism and that probably influenced their decisions about how to raise her. The unconscious needs add and um cycles. So, the more you get angry, the more angry you get and it just cycles and gets worse and worse. So that is the integrative perspective um and various different ways to have it and my approach which is there are multiple causes for all behavior. So that's it for this lecture. I'll see you in the le next lecture. Reach out if you need me and have a really great weekend. Bye. Take care.