welcome to introduction to psychology in chapter one i'm going to briefly introduce you guys the definition of psychology and the major divisions under psychology and what we can do career-wise with this field so first we will define psychology then i'll give you a very brief history of psychology so you know where we started at the beginning and where we are now with the field and then we'll move into what are the major fields of modern psychology or contemporary psychology and then we'll end it with the various careers that you can pursue with a degree in psychology so what is psychology psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior this encompasses all aspects of the mind and all aspects of behavior anything that can influence your state of mind anything that can influence your behavior falls under the umbrella of psychology since we do look at every single aspect that can influence your mind and behavior psychology is actually a very broad field how we learn about human behavior and the human mind as well as non-human animals is typically we have a theory based on that theory we will develop a hypothesis or some sort of prediction and then you test that hypothesis through experiments and research studies because we are science we always have to collect data to make informed decisions about hypotheses and theories the term empirical goes hand in hand with the field of science empirical means that we acquire knowledge based on observations observations don't necessarily have to be visual observations here the term observation refers to anything that is related to data collection so this could be something that you have observed visually this could be something that somebody reports in an interview or a questionnaire so it doesn't necessarily mean that the data has to be a visual observation so the term observation here can be a bit tricky but what we are looking at is data why should we learn about psychology some of you guys in this class are psychology majors some of you guys are not and so let's go over some of these possible reasons why you should learn psychology beyond the fact that you might or you might be taking this because you have to for those of you guys who are psychology majors my best guess is that you have some sort of interest in learning and helping others and yourself and this is a great reason because the better we can understand other people and the better we can understand ourselves the better we can show compassion for others the better we can understand somebody else's perspective which might help ease any sort of anger or sense of [Music] sadness or you know any other feelings you might have towards somebody else that might be negative that doesn't mean that the behavior should be forgiven or that the behavior should be forgotten but it allows us to at least understand the situation better for example i don't have the greatest relationship with my dad because he wanted me to become a doctor [Music] he comes from a very rough upbringing in the sense of you know he grew up poor he immigrated here from vietnam after the war so he came to a brand new country did not know the language and so he's a very hard worker and in his mind he believes that the best profession that his children can pursue is the medical field because not only am i helping others but i'm also making a lot of money and i can use that knowledge to help our own family members who may not always want to go see a doctor and so because of that belief he very much wanted me to become a doctor when i decided not to become a doctor after my mom passed away from cancer he became extremely upset because he felt that not only did he just lose his wife he's now losing control of his kids and so he's still not totally happy with me being a professor of psychology however i understand where he's coming from do i appreciate how he treated me when i was younger not early but i do understand where he's coming from and that's helped me move on from my past with him and so it helped me to still be able to maintain a cordial relay relationship with my dad and so learning about other people learning about the motivations and the intentions of other people can very much help us with our day-to-day lives they can help us calm down a lot more when we can at least understand where they're coming from and usually if we can at least understand where people are coming from it's a lot easier to move forward because at least we know that most people's behaviors is not from a place of maliciousness it's usually from a place of care or desperation or a sense of survival it also helps you to develop critical thinking skills again having you look at the bigger picture when you think about somebody and their behavior and their thoughts having you step back and not jump to conclusions not jump to stereotypes or ideas that have no truth behind it or a lot of times we make decisions about other people based on our own emotional reaction which may not always be accurate and so hopefully this course helps you take a step back for a second and really take a look at the big picture when it comes to trying to figure out somebody else's behavior okay and hopefully through all these chapters that we'll go through you'll be able to understand better the interaction between biology your genetics the environment that you were racing and you're surrounded by and your experiences and how all three of those play a role in who you are as a person and how we all are as people [Music] so hopefully my goal for everybody is that we take something away from this course and we learn to be a little more compassionate with each other more empathetic more sympathetic with each other because i think that's something we really need in our community right now [Music] we are in a very pivotal turning point in our country and i think it doesn't hurt for any of us to be a little more empathetic and sympathetic towards each other and to try to take an extra minute to understand somebody else instead of jumping to conclusions let's go through a brief history lesson in regards to the field of psychology psychology is actually rooted in philosophy philosophers had many ideas about human nature they had many ideas about life and so at some point somebody said we should start collecting data we should not just talk about these ideas but find data to learn more about the human mind and human behavior and so that's when we develop psychology william brunt and william james are considered the founders of psychology um loyola in the 1800s pioneered this idea called introspection so intros look within and so to look within somebody to try to understand who they are as a person and why they behave the way that they do so he put forth this idea of structuralism which is looking to understand the structure and the characteristics of the mind to understand human behavior again we're looking within the person to better understand them so we use observations to try to infer characteristics of the mind now william james also within that same time frame that william brunt was alive he was looking into natural selection as a major influence of human behavior and so he pioneered this idea of functionalism which is looking at how activities help an organism fit into its environment so all of our behaviors serve as some sort of function to help us survive within the environment so looking at what does this behavior accomplish in the context of that person's life to help them survive so william pioneered looking within for understanding human behavior william james wanted to look more at survival okay how natural selection plays into your survival and how that plays into the behaviors that have evolved in you so he's looking more at the whole rather than the individual parts william bunt wanted to look at the different structures and the different characteristics that make up the mind while william james wanted to look at the bigger picture in reference to the influences of your behavior and the purpose of your behavior sigmund freud is probably the most well-known psychologist in the field and in a cultural perspective probably the most famous psychologist in our culture we hear the term freudian slip this is who that term is referencing sigmund freud um also around the same time frame as william bunt and william james sigma freud was actually a neurologist and so he was a doctor who specialized in the nervous system and his big idea that he's most well known for is pioneering the idea of the unconscious mind that there is some sort of unconscious or subconscious entity that controls our behavior so we can access this unconscious mind through our dreams through slips of the tongue which is what we call freudian slip etc so he believes that the unconscious mind is not directly accessible and the only way to access that is to look at people's dreams look at statements i might have said that might have a bigger um a bigger or alternative meaning but because he believes that the unconscious mind is not directly accessible is actually extremely difficult to scientifically measure for example how do i measure the spirit of somebody a lot of us i think have a belief system that includes some sort of supernatural entity whether it be within your religion or spirituality i think most of us have some sort of belief system where it is virtually impossible for us to measure freud's concepts were the same way everything that he discussed or um all his theories that he came up with all revolved around this idea of the unconscious mind which is not something that we have direct access to so we can interpret your dreams to try to understand the unconscious mind but again it's extremely difficult to measure when there isn't something concrete that you can tap into it's not like i can stick a needle in you and measure your level of motivation rooted in your unconscious mind it doesn't work that way and so it becomes pretty difficult but he did popular popularized psychoanalytic theory so looking at the subconscious unconscious motivations for your behavior he has a lot of other theories that are pretty interesting we'll discuss some of those throughout the semester in the later chapters but for now in regards to the history psychology just know that he was the man who really put forth this idea of psychoanalytic theory and made it popular and pioneered the idea of the unconscious mind just psychology is a form of psychology that examines the experience as a whole so a lot closer to william james's original ideas dr psychology looks at the experience as a whole looks at the perception of the experience and how that perception influences our behavior and this is the foundation for humanistic psychology which we'll touch upon in a little bit but humanistic psychology takes a very compassionate approach to psychology believing that we all have good in us and if we are behaving in a way that is outside of the norm or more negative then there's something that drove us to behave in that way and one way to get us back on our right path is for society for family for friends for doctors for therapists to show compassion and love to the people who are off course to help them get back on course behaviorism one of the biggest fields of psychology was pioneered by john b watson uh he's known as the father of behaviorism but uh pavlov ivan pavlov and bf skinner definitely propelled behaviorism into more popular uh to becoming a lot more popular and we'll talk more about those three guys in the later chapter we actually have a full chapter on behaviorism that we'll talk about in a few weeks but behaviorism by definition is a belief in the idea that all behavior is learned behavior that the only behavior we should be concerned about are behaviors that are directly observable so not the unconscious mind not the brain but behavior that we can physically see and measure and that all behavior is learned behavior so if you learn to do something bad you can unlearn it and learn the correct behavior that this is the only way that we should take to understand human behavior how you behave today is a direct result of everything that's been taught to you and not the result of any sort of unconscious uh thought or motivation but only through a behavior that you've been taught and again it should be measurable so unlike freud behaviorists believe that you should only look at behaviors that can be directly observable and directly measured humanism was pioneered by abraham maslow and carl rogers you mentioned this before in connection to yourself psychology humanism is a perspective in psychology where we have this belief that everybody has the potential for good and that everybody innately is good and again if we are to veer off course we can get people back on course through unconditional love and compassion cognitive psychology we are kind of having a revolution right now it's starting to come back into contemporary psychology it kind of fell off for a second but it's getting a lot more attention right now cognitive psychology is pioneered by noam chomsky he's alive and cognitive psychologists aim to understand mental functioning so they aim to understand how you think okay so looking at the thought processes that lead up to your behavior what went through your mind before doing something more currently we see a rise in feminist and cultural psychology a lot of the early psychological theories and studies yes it was good that they were collecting data so moving away from philosophy and collecting data so we became a science however a lot of those theories and a lot of the data that was collected was collected on men and specifically white men and so a lot of these ideas and theories did not take into account the female experience nor did it take into account different cultural perspectives and influences and so we currently see a very big rise in feminist and cultural psychology to understand the influences of gender and our culture and our behavior so uh early psychology focus on weird people uh where's an acronym for western educated from industrialized rich and democratic countries so again this doesn't represent everybody on the planet and like i said most of this data was collected on men so we have a need to look at the female experience the experiences of people from different cultures truly understand the origins of human behavior and the influences of human behavior so contemporary psychology the big subdivisions that are all derived from the sub uh the fields that we just talked about in the history of psychology uh a lot of these main subdivisions are derived from those biopsychology and evolutionary psychology looks at how biology influences human behavior and how evolution can uh could have influenced behavior we'll cover that in chapter three of this course sensation and perception so your sense of taste your sense of sight hearing uh taste your perception how you see the world how you interpret the world all of those influence your behavior cognitive psychology like i said that's making a comeback developmental psychology which looks at how people develop over time for a very uh long period of time in psychology's history they only focus on looking at adults and not so much measuring kids freud was actually one of the first people to say hey we need to look at what kids experience to understand who they are as an adult so in the early stages of psychology they only focus on adults but we now know that looking at the childhood experience is also very important to understanding how people develop personality psychology so looking at the different characteristics that make up our personality [Music] social psychology how our social environment influences our behavior and our thoughts that's a really fun chapter when we get there that's going to be towards the end of the semester same thing with personality psychology developmental psychology we'll talk about that towards the middle of the semester industrial organizational psychology is one of the newest fields of psychology this field looks at humans interaction with our environment and more specifically technology so looking at how we interact with the technology in our lives health psychology looks at how our physical health can influence our thoughts and our behavior sports and exercise psychology have also increased as the importance of sports have increased in our culture and our society and the last one we'll kind of mention briefly is clinical psychology clinical psychology is the subfield or subdivision of psychology that looks at how can we treat mental illness so i think when most people think about psychology or hear about psychology they only think about the clinical aspect how to treat depression how to treat schizophrenia how to treat bipolar disorder how to treat narcissism right um but as you guys can see hopefully that that's one aspect of psychology and there are so many other fields that you can pursue the last thing we'll talk about is a brief uh discussion about the different careers in psychology and really anything every field out there whether you're looking at law administration of justice health nursing technician all of that stuff deals with people and so you can really take what you learn about human behavior and apply it into any field the main careers that people typically pursue is clinical so the treatment of people um and that doesn't necessarily have to be treating people with depression or bipolar disorder you can treat people in a more uh in a less medical way so you can go into therapy become a therapist you can of course become a professor like me you can go into research every field requires research so if you wanted to learn more about video games you can be a video game researcher or you can be a user experience a researcher one of my good friends in grad school did research on how video games can actually have a positive effect on your emotions she later on went to work at hp to help with their research department and product development and then she went on to facebook my other friend who also graduated with me went on to work at apple so she helps with their research department and their product development also so you can do research in really anything because research is really trying to understand human behavior and the human experience with your product or with whatever it is that you're looking into you can be a social worker you can work in human resources you can look into sales if you are excited about marketing and sales understand how we think is going to help you navigate your marketing pitch or your sales pitch a lot better right and so you can really take your understanding of human behavior and apply into any field okay so you guys have any questions about potential paths in psychology feel free to give send me an email or a message on canvas and i will gladly answer any questions you might have in regards to pursuing a career in psychology and what degree you might want to attain whether it be a bachelor's a master's or a phd or a psyd or an mft so it's a lot of different routes in psychology and that ends chapter one so the last bit that i forgot that education requirement depends on career choice so again if you want to talk to me about careers in psychology i can help you with that path and figure out what degree you would need to get based on the field you want to pursue