hello everyone and welcome to module one of our intro to psych boot camp the title of this module is psychology is a science if there is one thing that I get you to take away from this lecture it's that psychology is a science now when I ask you to list the main science disciplines that you can think of I'm gonna guess that you would say things like biology chemistry physics Etc but I want you to start looking at psychology as a science and through this lecture I am going to prove to you that it is absolutely a science discipline so what is psychology according to the American Psychological Association psychology is the study of the mind and behavior the discipline Embraces all aspects of The Human Experience some of the functions of the brain to the actions of Nations from Child Development to care for the Aged in every conceivable setting from scientific research centers to Mental Health Care Services the understanding of behavior is the Enterprise of psychologists yeah if we go back in time we will learn that the study of the mind has evolved quite a bit over time before the late 1800s philosophers relied on introspection and philosophical speculation to understand the nature of the Mind ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle contemplated the mind's relationship with the body and its role in cognition and behavior but it was really just that it was contemplation reflection it was imaginary there was no concrete evidence associated with the theories that they came up with but as the scientific method developed which we will touch on in a little bit um philosopher's approach shifted from introspection to empirically based and an empirical study relies on observation or experimentation to prove whatever it is they're trying to prove and functionalism were two early schools of thought in psychology that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries structuralism was championed by psychologists like Wilhelm want and Edward tischner and they focused on the analysis of basic elements of Consciousness through introspection aiming to identify the underlying structure of the mind so structural structuralists believe that the mind could be understood by breaking it down into its constituent Parts such as Sensations perceptions emotions motivation on the other hand functionalism was advocated by psychologists like William James and they emphasize the study of the mind's functions in its adaptive nature in relation to behavior and the environment functionalists were interested in how the mind works to help individuals adapt and to function in their environment and they consider the Mind as a dynamic system that interacted with the external world and unlike structuralism which focused on the structure of the Mind functionalism emphasized the Practical applications of psychology and the understanding of behavior in context so if you took any type of a psychology course in high school my guess is that you touched on Sigmund Freud he's considered one of the most controversial minds of the 20th century so Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and he is famous for popularizing psychoanalysis which was this revolutionary approach to understanding the human mind and behavior he proposed Concepts like the unconscious mind and the importance of early childhood experiences on later life behaviors and also the influence of sexuality and unconscious conflicts of human behavior so Freud's work on dream analysis and free association and the structure of the Mind including the ID the ego and the superego that all shaped our understanding of human psychology and laid the foundation for modern psychodynamic approaches to therapy despite having a very controversial approach Freud's theories have influenced various different areas of psychology including personality theory Psychopathology clinical practice so he's an extremely pivotal figure in the history of psychology and will definitely be touching on some more of these things in Greater detail in future chapters so this brings us to behaviorism so classical conditioning was accidentally discovered around the beginning of the 20th century by Russian physiologists Yvonne Pavlov Pavlov was studying digestive processes in dogs when he discovered that dogs salivated before they even received their food in fact after repeated pairing of a lab attendant and the food the dog started to salivate at the site of the lab attendants so Pavlov coined this phenomena psychic secretions and he noted that dogs were not only responding to their biological need which was Hunger but also a need developed by learning so John B Watson was interested in how classical conditioning could be applied to humans in 1921 Watson and his research assistant Rosalie Raynor experimented on an 11 month old infant named Albert the goal was to condition Albert to fear a white rat by pairing the white rat with a loud bang which was considered an unconditioned stimulus initially Albert showed no fear of rats but once the rat was repeatedly paired with a loud noise which was that unconditioned stimulus Elbert developed a fear of rats so the noise induced the fear and after pairings between the loud noise and the rat Albert started to fear the rat so Watson's experiment suggested that classical conditioning could cause some phobias as well beginning in the 1930s Skinner started his experimentation on the behavior of animals Skinner's Quest was to observe the relationship between observable stimuli and response and essentially he wanted to know why these animals behaved the way that they do so Skinner controlled his experiments by using what is called or what was coined the Skinner boxes the Skinner box was like a contraption that would automatically dispense food pellets and electric shocks to rats Skinner believed that the learning that he observed in his Skinner boxes could be applied to human behavior as well he called this learning operant conditioning so operant conditioning can be described as Behavior adjustments as a result of greater or lesser negative or positive reinforcement and punishments so Skinner hypothesized that human behaviors were controlled by rewards and punishments and that their behaviors could be shaped using these tactics we're going to do a deep dive into these later on so don't fret if you didn't catch all of that just yet so I included this quote by John B Watson to show just how profound the belief was by behaviorists that we should focus only on observable behaviors without reference to any internal mental processes or subjective experiences um the quote reads as follows it says give me a dozen healthy infants well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select doctor lawyer artist Merchant Chief and yes even better man and Thief regardless of his talents pensions Tendencies abilities vocations and race of his ancestors so essentially what he's saying is it doesn't matter the child's home life is genetic predispositions Etc Watson claimed that all Behavior can be taught and learned devoid of things like motivation and emotion so moving on to Maslow Rogers and humanism Maslow's theory proposes that as humans meet basic needs we look to satisfy our higher needs that occupy our mindset so Maslow's theory is depicted in this pyramid that you see right here in front of you starting with physiological needs at the base going all the way up to self-actualization at the top so according to Maslow when each level of needs is accomplished the next level of needs becomes dominant needs are like stairs you start at the bottom and like I said you work your way up and you can't reach a higher level until your basic needs are met so at the base here we have our physiological needs like food Water Shelter warmth and then we have our security needs things like just general safety and employment and a paycheck uh then you move up to social needs like having family friendship intimacy then you can move on to seeking out things like respect and recognition and confidence some of those more abstract needs that we have and the ultimate goal is self-actualization also known as self-fulfillment so unlike the psychoanalytic approach that Freud proposed where the therapist plays an important role in interpreting what conscious Behavior reveals about our unconscious mind client-centered therapy involves the patient taking the lead role in a therapy session so Carl Rogers was one of the founders of humanistic psychology Rogers developed person-centered therapy which is also known as client-centered therapy which emphasized the importance of the therapeutic relationship in the individual's unique subjective experiences so Roger believed that individuals have an innate tendency towards self-actualization and growth and that therapy should provide a supportive and empathetic environment to facilitate the process of change so he emphasized three main things in the therapeutic relationship one being the importance of unconditional positive regard which is a term that refers to the fact that the therapist will accept their client for who they are no matter what it is they say number two being empathy and number three being genuinous genuineness in the therapeutic relationship um with these three together that created a non-judgmental and accepting space for clients to explore their thoughts feelings and experiences the cognitive Revolution started in the 1950s when social scientists started to question the long-standing behaviorist approach you'll remember that I shared Watson's quote a few slides back about give him a dozen healthy infants and he'll raise them or train them to be whatever it is he wants um well critics of this behaviorist approach believe that behaviorism couldn't account for everything for example how do we explain how babies end up learning such a vast vocabulary and accurate syntax it certainly isn't from like positive or negative reinforcement or any type of classical conditioning techniques there's something more innate at play here um so came to be the idea of cognitive psychology so this is the empirical observation of mental events and knowledge involved in things like recognizing an object or remembering a name or having an idea or understanding a sentence or solving some type of a problem you'll notice that I said empirical um remember empirical implies observation and experimentation but how the heck do you observe the process of remembering a name this is where things really started to get interesting in the realm of psychology this is where psychologists starting you started using tools to measure brain activity this is also about the time we started to use the metaphor of a computer to describe the brain we adopted what is called an information processing system which basically suggests that the human mind is a system that processes information through the application of logical rules and strategies so like a computer the mind has a limited capacity for the amount and nature of information that it can process now there's no real father or mother or founder of cognitive psychology but there is this little guy right over here this is Noam Chomsky he's often referred to as the father of modern Linguistics he argued that language should be viewed as a system of innate mental rules that we are just born with that are wired into the brain and the result of evolution so when we think of cognitive psychology I really want us to think of mental processes these individual like almost um what am I trying to say invisible processes that are at play that we don't necessarily see but we can measure using Advanced measurement tools so now that we've talked about the history of psychology um we talked about psychoanalysis to the humanistic approach to the cognitive Revolution kind of brings us to modern day psychology or contemporary psychology so the APA was founded in 1892 and is a Professional Organization representing psychologists in the United States the APA is the largest organization of psychologists in the world and its mission is to advance and disseminate psychological knowledge for the betterment of people it's made up of divisions each representing an area of special interest to contemporary psychologists the association for psychological science was founded in 1988 and seeks to advance the scientific orientation of psychology its founding resulted from disagreements that were had between the scientific and clinical branches of psychology within the APA so the aps APS publishes five research journals and engages in education and advocacy with different funding agencies so I really want you to be able to tell the difference between these two organizations why they were created and what they do so you're going to remember these five pillars of psychology that I shared in the intro video under the getting started module I'm going to do a quick introduction to each one of these different pillars and I'm going to give you some extra Insight on some of the curriculum at UT Tyler that extrapolates on each of these areas in case you want to take an elective class to do a deeper dive on these topics because again this is just an intro class so we're just going to briefly touch the surface of each of these so biopsychology is exactly how it sounds it's the school of thought and psychology that is preoccupied with power biology influences our Behavior people who study biopsych investigate the biological and physiological processes that underlie all behavior and all of our mental processes it examines the relationship between the brain and behavior as well as the genetic biochemical and neural basis of human and animal behavior for example someone who studies biopsych might choose to study the role that genetics plays in the development of like a severe Psychopathology like schizophrenia so they might work to identify potential genetic markers that are indicative of eventually developing that disease other examples include folks who study sensory motor systems sleep drug use reproductive Behavior neurodevelopment plasticity of the nervous system and so forth and so on if you're interested in this area and you want to take a site class that focuses solely on this area of psychology I recommend taking psych 4318 which is a physiological psychology presuming that you've all had at least a high school biology class hopefully remember Charles Darwin and natural selection and his book The Descent of Man basically his theories of evolution says that evolution is a gradual change in a species through adaptation over time natural selection is a mechanism by which better adapted organisms survive to produce a greater number of viable offspring so evolutionary psychologists essentially propose that humans evolve Tendencies to think feel and behave in certain ways and not others because of our environment so students tend to find evolutionary psychology extremely fascinating um one interesting example of something in evolutionary psychologist might study is make preferences so David Buss is a famous evolutionary psychologist who found women valued earning potential factors greater than men and men valued potential reproductive factors like Youth and attractiveness greater than women in their prospective mates the explanation for these underlying preferences are that we are all inherently motivated by the prospect of survival and procreation so again guys this is just a school of thought I'm not saying this is what I think or what I believe but yeah evolutionary theorists would say that we all just really want to pass on our genes so use and attractiveness are indicative of fertility and in our past as a species men were limited in their access to fertile females so it's no wonder that men are subconsciously or consciously rating these qualities is important in a mate um in the same breath women allegedly since the beginning of time have looked to men to provide monetary and financial resources for both them and their offspring so that's why they find themselves rating earning potential factors as being most important um some people like myself find evolutionary psychology to be a little bit hokey mostly because it relies a lot on hindsight right we're starting with an outcome like make preference and then working our way back to try to explain why these things happened back in caveman years um so it's a lot of speculation but it definitely is still interesting we do not have a class in evolutionary psychology um but it is touched on in several different uh core courses in our curriculum so cognitive psychology we talked about the cognitive Revolution and I kind of already defined what cognitive Psych is cognition is just a fancy word for thoughts so remember I said when you think about cognitive psychology I hope you think about those individual unique invisible mental processes that's still what I want you to think of so cognition equals thoughts so cognitive psychologists they study things like perception and attention memory language thinking we're going to touch on some of those more in future chapters but those hidden mental processes that we talked about we do have a cognitive site class so if you're really into this area please look into taking it psych 4315 cognitive psychology developmental psychology um this one's a fun one so it's the scientific study of mental physical and Social Development over the lifespan whereas my awesome advisories to say during undergrad developmental psych is the study of you from womb to tomb so developmental psychologists study everything from how gender influences toy choice to how our moral development and Adolescence changes into adulthood to how our early relationships with our parents influence our romantic relationships later on in life it's really a broad umbrella but we'll definitely take a deeper dive into this area later on we do have a few classes that I would say touch on developmental psychology um the first one that I think of is obviously psych 4353 which is titled developmental psychology this class is actually required if you're a Psychology major but also if you're a nursing major so you may be taking that one um I'd also argue that you know if you're going to any area of um like the medical field whether it be nursing or you want to go on to become physician's assistant or go to med school developmental psychology will be prudent free to know I also teach a psychology a parenting class which talks about parenting everything from infants to adults so that's also a developmental-esque course and that one is Psych 3360. personality so personality Psych is another sector of sites that students tend to love this area focuses on psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring that differentiate one person from another and lead people to act in a consistent almost predictable manner so personalities often measured through scales and something called Factor analyzes so you've probably taken many a BuzzFeed quizzes claiming to be able to discern your personality but guys I'm here to tell you that there's a lot of disagreement um on the reliability and validity of even the most scientifically found personality scales and we'll get into that a little bit later on but people who study psychological traits tend to seek how to understand how many traits there are how traits are organized and relate to one another and what the origins of these traits are and what the life outcomes of these traits are for example if you're an introvert how did you become that way or were you born that way what kinds of things are likely to happen in your life and what kinds of decisions are you likely to make because you're an introvert and you guessed it we do have a class for that um psych 4341 personality psychology so maybe this will inspire you to check that class out as well social psychology so social Psych is the scientific study of how thoughts and feelings and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual imagined and implied presence of other people so it's concerned with how social phenomena influence us and how people interact with others the way we perceive ourselves in relation to the rest of the world plays a profound impact on our choices behaviors and our beliefs Additionally the opinions of others also shape the way that we view ourselves it's all interconnected so folks who study social psychology may look at the science behind Conformity and obedience or even Prejudice and aggression should be no surprise to you but we do have a social site class that one is Psych 3306. now if you've ever once uttered the words I want to be a psychologist I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you meant you wanted to be a clinical psychologist so Clinical Psychology is a specialty in Psychology that involves the practical application of psychological theories for treating psychological problems and encompasses the prevention assessment diagnosis and treatment of many complex human behaviors problems and disorders so my goal by the end of this class is to show you that you could be a psychologist and study human behavior and not be a clinical psychologist but at the same time I understand the appeal a lot of my graduate coursework was in Clinical Psychology and I spent about five years coordinating admissions for our Clinical Psychology Masters and PhD program so if you find yourself Uber interested in these areas reach out to me I'm happy to help you start looking at next steps to becoming a clinical psychologist so we do have a few classes in clinical psych that you can take we have intro to clinical and counseling which is site 3350 we have abnormal psychology which is psych 4331 and like I said we have an entire doctoral program and a master's program in clinical psych we also have six faculty members in the department who are considered clinical psychologists so if this is your area that you're really excited about you definitely have come to the right place here at ET Tyler like I said at the beginning of this lecture psychology is a science and because it is a science it is based on Research so why on Earth should we care about research for starters it gives us a reliable systematic way to consider our questions if we don't have the ability to test our questions a question is just that it's an unanswered inquiry so if I want to know if working out has an impact on our memory then I have to have a way to test that I want to know what causes a person to commit a crime I have to have a way to test that so the research process is essential to helping us draw logical conclusions grounded in science now I can tell you from experience that when I was an undergraduate psych student I feared my research methods class honestly we all did it was a hard class but it really challenges you to do more than just ooh and awe about all of the interesting psychological phenomena it requires you to think critically about how these findings came to be and whether or not the way in which they came to be was reliable and valid so before we get into the nitty-gritty crash course on research methods we have to address this guys we are weird we are so weird stands for Western educated industrialized rich and Democratic so an ongoing criticism of psychological research that we are desperately trying to correct is that certain populations AKA weird populations have been over studied and then the results of these Studies have been applied to other populations so as you can imagine there are many differences between people in this weird group and people in less industrialized less Urban and non-western societies um these differences occur in a bunch of different areas including perception cooperation immoral reasoning that is people vary depending on their culture and their environment so I want you to keep that in mind every time we talk about a particularly interesting finding we have to take it with a grain of salt I think I said that already in this lecture but we need to be educated consumers of This research and strive to seek out studies and sources that have completed studies and validated measures in other areas of the world so psychology is a science because it utilizes a scientific method again this is probably familiar from your science course in high school the scientific method is a technique using tools like observation experimentation and statistical analyzes to learn about the world the first step in the scientific method is to develop a research question you are then tasked with doing background research on a topic you learn as much as you can about it and then you make some type of an educated guess or hypothesis where you predict the outcome of an experiment that you're going to conduct then you perform that experiment and then afterwards you have to analyze the results and you finally come to conclusions and compare your original hypothesis to the actual results you also have to have a way to disseminate that information that you gleaned effectively to others and guys every major scientific finding that we have come to know and every really interesting fact that you learn in this class it derived from a psychologist's following steps that looked similar to these so let's move on to touching on several different approaches that exist to conducting research clinical case studies so clinical case studies are clinical observations of one person or a small group rather than a large pool of participants a good example might be a developmental psychology who observes an early childhood special ed class of individuals who have autism over a period of time now this researcher will likely be able to obtain some really rich specific data on this small group of folks but there is a risk in studying such a small group and that is the risk of generalizing these really specific findings to Society at large right there's lots of other things that impact that small group um like their upbringing the region that they live in their teacher in the classroom all those different things um so people sometimes fare away from taking things too literally from a case study because they can't always be generalized to the larger public the next approach I want to touch on is a naturalistic observation so this means observing behavior in its natural habitat I suppose my last example would also be considered a naturalistic observation the psychologist observing the ecsc class in the case of this type of research approach it's essential for the Observer to be as unobtrusive and inconspicuous as possible because guys our Behavior changes when we know that we're being watched I really love that example from the textbook where they say that our driving behavior would differ if we're driving on a deserted Highway versus driving while being followed by a police car on that same Highway um there's also a risk of Observer Bias if that developmental psychologist was alone in observing those ecsc kiddos and she had these specific hypotheses in mind about the children's Behavior there's a chance that either consciously or subconsciously she would skew her observations to fit her research goals and predictions a way to combat that would be to employ several observers to view that same classroom with her and then compare their observations in order to test the iterator of reliability amongst them so I would say that in my psychological research experience survey uses the most common the most affordable and the easiest way to gather data and because surveys are just so dang easy to develop and to distribute we can reach a large number of individuals with General ease and because we're able to sample a large group this ultimately leads to a sample of participants that is more diverse and thus more reflective of the general population which ultimately makes it easier to generalize our results to the greater public um so the downside though of surveys it's kind of similar to the downside of naturalistic observation you know if you know you're being watched your behavior is going to change well the fact of the matter is guys when we get surveys we're just not always 100 honest um so if I wanted to do a mock survey and ask you if you've ever cheated in an academic class before even if I told you that the survey was Anonymous there's a good percentage of you that would report no you've never cheated um when in all actuality that might have been true for you so like everything else in life we have to take these results um derived from surveys with a grain assault another approach is archival research which involves looking at past records or data sets to look for interesting patterns or relationships an example might be me deciding to look at your grades from high school as well as your first semester GPA here at UT Tyler to see if there's a relationship between your algebra grades and your GPA here at UT Tyler so the perks of this kind of research is it's relatively cheap right I don't have to pay research assistants to help me develop any type of a survey I don't have to hire research assistants to work in a lab to observe students it's also just so fast as soon as I'm approved to conduct the study I can pull the data I don't have to wait to collect it the one downside though is I really have to tailor my research question to the data um so what if not all of you took algebra in high school I'd have to amend my research question to fit the data that I actually have access to longitudinal research so this is often used by developmental psychologists and it involves Gathering data repeatedly over a period of time so maybe I would choose to test a group of 18 year olds this year on their political ideologies and then 10 years after they've lived some life maybe gone to college entered the workforce maybe they have families now I would test them again to see if their political views have changed or stayed the same there's a lot of really rich information that can come from measuring the same Folks at two or more different points in time but there's also of course some downsides just like there has been for every other approach to conducting a research study um the number one downside is it takes a really long time right that study that I just described um would probably take me about 12 years to complete and of course there would be attrition um attrition just is a fancy way of saying dropping out so some of the original people I studied would undoubtedly have dropped out of the study or I wouldn't be able to contact them because I didn't have the correct contact information because it's been 10 years and that stuff is hard to keep track of maybe some of them have died God forbid um whatever the case it would be unlikely for me to successfully be able to sample that whole group of people twice so before moving on to talking about how we analyze data I want to touch on the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning so I know the book showed you that circular image to compare the two but I like this one a lot more so by definition inductive reasoning is the act of moving from specific observations to generalities and deductive reasoning starts with generalities derived from existing theories and moves to specific conclusions so how are these two types of reasoning used in Psychology well let's think about the case study slide that we went over um when we're engaged in specific observations of a small group then we attempt to generalize the findings that would be inductive reasoning right there so experimental research on the other hand involves looking at existing Theory you know doing a bunch of background research coming to a specific hypothesis and then testing the hypothesis to make a specific conclusion so those are the the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning okay so humor me we are going to watch this kind of silly video about how ice cream is one of the number one killers on the planet I don't know okay now humor me we are going to watch this kind of silly video about how ice cream is one of the number one killers on the planet like most people I enjoy and taste of sleep of ice cream especially Oreo blizzards but what few people realize is how dangerous to treat ice cream has become first there's the issue of obesity the second there are higher crime rates third there's the loss of life due to a rise in the number of drowning again and finally as more ice cream is sold there's an increase in Forest Financial given these indisputable facts I need you to support my vision of an ice cream free world while Banning ice cream trucks from entering the neighborhood may sound far-fetched when it comes to problem solving and common issue is misunderstanding the difference between correlation and causation this misunderstanding can influence our decisions sometimes with serious consequences that Ripple throughout the community correlation is when two things are related but one does not cause the other usually this means the two are in some way related to a third Factor but not always if you have a big enough pile of data you can find plenty of relationships that are purely coincidental like the strong relationship between the sale of margarine and divorce rates in the state of Maine with the sale of ice cream the third factor is weather when it is hot outside people buy more ice cream they are more likely to go for a swim and there's a general increase in people out and about enjoying the weather helping improve conditions for Crime to take place as well as the dry conditions associated with forest fires a note of caution there's a growing Trend in our digital world called Data dredging this is using analytics to sift through the mountains of data hoping to find useful relationships instead of a problem in search of a solution dredging data is a solution looking to find a problem all of what I just discussed about correlations does not mean that binding and correlation is without value in fact correlations are a vital part of helping us move to the next step the discovery of causation unlike correlation causation is when you can claim that one thing causes another thing to handle in order to make this claim you need to be able to demonstrate an actual cause and effect relationship preferably a strong relationship an example most of us are familiar with is the pharmaceutical industry in order to make the claim that a particular drug causes a certain effect such as lowering your cholesterol or growing hair the FDA requires companies support those claims putting the drug right before phase 12-step process that takes approximately 12 years this process uses control groups and clinical trials to test the growth making sure that X causes Y and that the drug is safe the acceptable error rate can go as high as five percent for some drugs meaning that the clinical trials prove that there's a 95 chance the drug does what it claims bugs with serious health implications such as those used to treat a heart condition are held to an even stricter standard or acquiring proof up to 99 effectiveness back to ice cream what about ice cream and obesity while it may seem like common sense that it does cause obesity the fact is that we don't yet know the true strength of the relationship if we look at the sale of ice cream there's actually an inverse relationship with weight people gain weight in the winter when sales were low and lose weight in the warm summer months when more ice cream is being consumed this might suggest ice cream is the new diet food luckily you now know to be cautious of drawing conclusions of causation from correlation instead Recent research on the subject has been looking at different types of sugars used in making a wide range of sweet Foods what scientists have discovered is that the hypothalamus which is an area of the brain that regulates the human appetite reacts differently when we consume food with fructose instead of glucose this has researchers speculated that any high fructose foods such as ice cream they result in people not feeling full so they continue to eat this Theory proves difficult however when we start considering apples and other natural fruits also containing fructose not just ice cream and chocolate cake as you can see causation is quite a bit different in correlation binding correlations is easy improving causation is part of it no wonder it takes 12 years just know that a pill causes hair to grow the bottom block on the news in boardrooms and coffee shops everywhere you go you are your claims that X causes one from politics to the wedding from the stock market to personal relationship is human nature to try and explain things to create stories that make sense just keep in mind as you hear it clean what causes water that correlation is not causation all right okay so what is that takeaway message from that video um the number one takeaway message from the video I'd argue from this lecture but I already said I want the takeaway message to be um that psychology is the science but the number two takeaway message is that correlation does not indicate causation so ice cream does not cause forest fires or increase crime weight rates um buying margarine doesn't cause divorce if you reside in Maine they're correlated but one does not cause the other so oftentimes things are related by coincidence and other times they're related because there is this third variable at play that third variable is called account a confounding variable a perfect example was that ice cream sales and the forest fires they're related right they're correlated um but there was no cause and effect there there was a confounding variable the weather at play causing folks to buy more ice cream and causing the dry weather necessary for forest fires to occur so remember correlation does not indicate causation could be because of a third confounding variable so moving on we measure correlation by calculating a statistic called the correlation coefficient so the correlation coefficient is a number from negative 1 to positive one and it measures the strength and the direction of a relationship so the closer the number is to zero the weaker the relationship and the closer the number is to either negative one or positive one the stronger the relationship so that means a correlation coefficient of negative 0.9 will be a stronger relationship than a correlation coefficient of 0.4 if that makes sense so a positive correlation means that the variable moves in the variables move in the same direction so as one variable increases so does the other variable likewise another version of a positive correlation would be a variable decreasing and then the other variable decreasing as well so they're moving in the same direction either positively or negatively conversely a negative correlation means that they move in different directions so as one increases one decreases and then vice versa so these Scatter Plots here were also in your textbook but the one on the left shows a positive correlation between height and weight in that when height increases so does weight which makes sense we then see in the middle here there's a negative correlation between hours of sleep and levels of tiredness in that the hours of sleep you get as they increase your level of tiredness decreases and then last but not least these random Dots here show that there is absolutely no no correlation between hours of sleep and our shoe size okay now like I said in the beginning of my lecture um okay okay so I want to be clear here that my lectures that I developed will not be all-encompassing because this is a really abbreviated class right I'm teaching the same amount of content that I'm going to be teaching in a 15-week semester so I really just have to focus on touching on the high points here so I've simplified my list of terms that I want you to be able to recognize so that when it comes to identifying them in the future you'll be able to do so so an experimental group an experimental group is the group in an experiment that gets the manipulation by the researcher the control group on the other hand receives no manipulation or no intervention it's also considered a placebo if you know that term better um an independent variable think of that as the Cause right so what is being controlled by the researcher and then the dependent variable is the effect what the experimenter ends up measuring to see if the independent variable had any influence at all so let's see here I really like this chart here to help you determine which one is an independent which is a dependent variable it asks you questions like is this variable manipulated by the researchers if yes it's the independent variable if no it's the dependent variable then the other question does this variable cause an outcome if it's yes it's an independent variable if it's a no it's a dependent variable then is this variable the result of another variable if the answer is yes it's a dependent variable if no it's an independent variable so think of it independent variable is always going to be the cause dependent variable is always going to be the effect so you're going to need to be able to identify the experimental group the control group The IV which is the independent variable and the DV which is the dependent variable we're going to have an example on the quiz so I want to try a different example right here with you let's practice so participants are randomly assigned to one of two groups the one group receives a caffeinated beverage while the other group receives a non-caffeinated beverage both groups then participate in a memory recall task where they're presented with a list of words to memorize and later asked to recall as many words as possible the number of words correctly recalled by each group is recorded and compared to determine the effect of caffeine on memory recall so if you're still with me here I want you to pause this lecture to try to figure it out again you need to identify experimental group control group IV DV so pause me okay like I said we are going to identify the experimental groups the control group the independent variable and the dependent variable so without further ado the experimental group is the group of college students who are given the caffeinated beverage control group is the group of college students who are given the non-caffeinated beverage the independent variable is the presence or absence of caffeine in the beverage administered to the participants so that's the thing being manipulated whether or not the beverage has caffeine or not and the dependent variable is the memory recall performance of the college students measured by the number of words correctly recalled from a list of words presented to them how many of you guys got it right if you should know any one thing about me it's that I'm absolutely obsessed with the show the office I'm finding though as I get older my students get younger sometimes my office references are lost on folks um but hopefully you have seen the show and that you recognize this little picture here let's get ethical ethical is from the infamous ethics seminar if not go watch season five episode two you're welcome anyways I'm just briefly going to touch on chapter 2.4 from psychology to ethics it's very important information but I really want to focus on honing on what's going to be most relevant to you um if you intend on going on to graduate school so medical school um any type of graduate program in science or social sciences anything like that is likely that they will have expected you to engage in some type of research during your undergraduate experience so keep that on your list your running list of things to do to prepare for the future um getting engaged in extracurricular research activities but anyways as a faculty member or as a student if you are going to be proposing a research study you have to run it by what is called an IRB IRB stands for institutional review board and they are responsible for reviewing all research proposals to ensure that the experiment will not result in any harm to participants so any research institution like a university a hospital a health care facility whatever you name it if they receive federal support for research involving human participants they must establish an IRB and their purpose their main purpose is to protect participants so you hopefully read in your ebook about the Tuskegee syphilis study I'm just going to recap it here for you it was a notoriously unethical study that was conducted by the U.S Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972. the study enrolled 600 African-American men um 399 of them had syphilis and 201 did not and those who had the disease were never even told that they had it the study was designed to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis and the participants were deliberately denied effective treatment including penicillin which became available in the 1940s so the study continued even after the discovery of penicillin and despite the availability of a cure so these people could have been cured the participants were deceived and misled about the true nature of the study and many suffered severe Health consequences including death so the Tuskegee syphilis study is considered a really dark chapter in the history of medical research and led to really significant changes in ethical guidelines for human subjects research such as the national research Act of 1974 which helped to impose ethical guidelines on human subject research