hello everybody and welcome to our first lecture for the semester uh this is going to be part one of chapter one and so we're going to cover kind of the you know what psychology is the history of psychology and this is going to correspond with module one in the Meyers textbook and so just to kind of give you an overview of this chapter again module one is the history and scope of psychology module two are research strategies and how psychologists ask can answer questions in module 3 is basically how you use uh what you've learned from research in your everyday life and and how to understand statistics and whatnot so module two and three will be in part two of this lecture so first you know why are you in this class uh what do you think psychology is I know some of you have answered that in your forums uh you might find a lot of different you know reactions to people when you tell them that you're going to be studying psychology this semester uh often times the lay person um reaction to that is kind of negative and they'll say oh I need to get away from you I get this in my everyday life if I tell people a PhD in Psychology especially I try not to tell people that but um if you tell them that they'll say oh wow you know are you analyzing me are you trying to read my mind uh so you probably are having to deal with some of those reactions and so that's one of the first things that we try to do in this class is try to kind of see you know where your misconceptions of psychology are and to try to correct those misconceptions and then hopefully you can go out and and try to do that as well in your everyday life um and so this might be you before you start this class excited to learn about psychology to understand people better and then once you learn to how you understand people better you might become a little bit more jaded this is a joke obviously but you know I have to say sometimes there's a little bit of an element of Truth to that um as well but what is you know in all serious what is psychology seriousness is psychology is the scientific stud of behavior and mental processes so there's three things I want you to focus on here um I kind of put this in different order but understand that this is a science psychology is a science and we'll talk a lot about that why it's a science um I used to think when I first started taking psychology classes that that you know psychologists were a little bit you know uh touchy about that like trying to prove yes we are a science um but you know if you are coming from the hard Sciences you might be a little skeptical is psychology really a science or is it just kind of a soft science um so we focus on that scientific study and we're looking at behavior and mental processes when we talk about mental processes these are all the things that you really can't overly observe so things like thoughts emotions or feelings um so focus on those three things uh we call the psychological Triad behaviors thoughts and feelings and that's what we focus on so this definition will come up over and over and over um again so how is psychology a science um there's a number of different things that go into scientific thinking and kind of that scientific um characteristics which we'll talk about uh one is having this passion for exploring and understanding phenomenon but we're doing this in a way that we're not misleading others and we're not being misled um and so again there's that balance to that um there's a scientific attitude to try to shift fact from fiction to try to kind of clarify what is just you know a story and what is fact typically we don't like to use the the term fact this F this slide is coming from the publisher um I'll explain in a minute what we' have to do to get you know all facts um kind of we Tred to look at support for research and support for findings but we don't typically make the broad bold claim that will you found a fact so there's a high degree of skepticism and then also humility so humility um is manifested in awareness of the fact that we can make errors we can make mistakes um we don't know everything and we also have our own biases and values that might be guiding what we do in research and how we interpret research so we try to have this openness to New Perspectives so I talked to you in the the introduction um hopefully you watch that introduction video and I ask you to think of some questions that you had about human nature and and specifically some things that happened over the summer or maybe over just the last year some questions that you have about the way humans Act uh and so try to come up with those questions again think of those questions again um the way that we will study those questions is maybe you know not ruminating on them not using kind of anecdotal thinking back to experiences that we've had in the past uh we're not you know being introspective but we're using what's called an empirical approach and so when we talk about the scientific method we'll unpack kind of what that looks like and and what we mean by that so A scientific attitude I mentioned this before um there's three different aspects to having this scientific attitude one like I mentioned before is to be skeptical but there's a balance here to be skeptical about you know findings or things that people have told you but to not be cynical um and so with that comes this open-mindedness being open-minded to okay maybe I don't know everything uh maybe I haven't thought of this before but again with that balance you're trying not to be gullible and so with that open-mindedness and trying to find that balance between skepticism and open-mindedness we try to scientists follow the data uh that's what that's what we call so we colle we had a question we collect the data to try to answer that question um and you know if we're looking at the data and analyzing it it doesn't support what we thought was going to happen we have to trust that um if we collected the data correctly we have to trust that and try not to you know fit the data to what we already believed uh and then thirdly there's this aspect of humility um I like this quote from the book knowing what we don't know enables generosity and intellectual humility so you have to have this understanding that okay yeah I know a lot about something or I know you know a little bit about something and realize how much that you don't know so that all those three things need to be um in place there I have a video link um I'm gonna put this on Moodle and kind of Link or you know have the title so you can know where to to click that um that link in conjunction with this lecture but um I want you to watch a clip from Back to the Future and it's talking about Doc Brown um if you're not familiar with Back to the Future I think this clip gives you enough information and just kind of you know look at his example and go does he fit this true scientific attitude um as opposed to you know Sheldon Cooper you know does he fit the scientific attitude does he have the open-mindedness and humility you know there's no right or wrong answers but it's just something uh to think about so along um with all this to be you know a a uh had the scientific thinking we need to use what's called critical thinking um and I'm sure heard of that about this before in your high school classes and other classes that you've had uh that's something that you'll you know hear a lot about people give lip service to about we need to have good critical thinkers that come out of college um and so this really essentially is smart thinking um having that again that open mind in this but also that skepticism um and you know being when you hear something to think is that correct I don't know if that's right and it can be anything it can be things that you hear in classes things that you can read in your textbooks um one thing about an undergraduate uh education is you get a lot of your information from a textbook and that textbook is written by authors and psychologists and scientists that have their own biases and they pick and choose what they want and put it all together um and so I think you know by the time you get into graduate school you start to read just primary source materials and you're not just kind of spoonfed this information so a big part of critical thinking is to not automatically accept arguments and conclusions that are given to you whether it's in a news story you know a magazine something you've read online something that someone has told you um and so one aspect one part of critical thinking um is again when you are a little bit cynical and not cynical but a little bit critical and kind of wondering what's going on with this you can ask yourself these questions so when you're when you're given some kind of argument ask well how do they know that right so think about that try to figure that out what is the person's agenda do they have one uh do they have some kind of underlying you know they want to make money um they want to have some kind of narrative they're giving to you or do they simply just want to dism information is the conclusion based on an anecdote or evidence so is it based on a story or do they have actual um empirical evidence to show you does the evidence justify a cause and effect conclusion or is it correlational we'll talk a lot about that in this class um the difference between those two is there just a relationship or could they actually just prove or not prove but show that there's cause and effect and then what kind of alternative explanations could be possible so what I have here um is a an article that I found that was written this year and it's talking about Jen Z and so the title of it it's causing them to drop out of life how for phones have warped Jen Z I have a link to this paper here you can look at this kind of look through that and say okay ask yourself these questions um you know how and why do they you know are they coming up with these arguments what's their agenda do they have anecdote or evidence one particular Link in that paper um talks about a Google um spread it's not a spreadsheet but it's a Google Docs file and you can look at that and they will show you all of the research that they've compiled um to put this together so that can kind of give you a clue of what we're talking about but it's an interesting article to look look at um I suggest that you have the link here in the slides which you also will have the the link on Moodle as well so now we're getting kind of into this his history part and kind of where psychology started from where did it begin psychology essentially is the intersection of the study of philos philosophy and Physiology it's these two different areas that have come together so philosophy what we're talking about is the nature of human thought the universe and the connections between those two so you know notice this human thought so we're looking at internal processes here then physiology this is the normal functions of living organisms and their parts so kind of more of a hard science um and more of a kind of a just this again soft philosophy and these two came together so we'll start with Aristotle like we often do um it's interesting with Aristotle Aristotle had a lot of different theories for things that we talk about in Psychology so theories of sensation and perception theories of of motivation just to to name a few um but part of Aristotle one of his theories was to um divide Souls into three different types or sections and so we have the rational which was the human Spirit or Soul sensitive which was the animal describe the animal soul and nutritive which was the vegetative Soul which inhabited all plants and trees and and all that kind of life um so according to this Theory the um again the vegetable had just the nutritive spirit it was just the one Spirit the animal was divided into the sensitive and the nutritive and then the human had all three of these together so this is called the tri tripartite theory of the Soul you don't need to memorize that it's just kind of a fun fact to know um but this Theory led to dualism and we're still talking about dualism today so one of the questions you have to ask yourself when thinking about dualism is what exactly is the mind okay what do you think of when you think of what the mind is and this is important right when we're talking about um psychology well dualism says that the mind and body are distinct and separate entities and so the body obviously is made out of material it's a material substance that we can see we can observe feel U the mind is immaterial it's a completely different substance we don't really know exactly what it is but it's separate from the body so this is why it's dualism there's two different kind of entities existing together modernism on the other hand is saying that well there's no separation there's no two distinct types of uh substances that basically everything's biological and what you perceive as the mind uh is um just a byproduct of what's happening in your brain just a byproduct of neural processes uh so there's no separation there it's just kind of um you know your experience of what your mind is doing so if you look at these and think about this kind of think of what which Camp do you really subscribe to are you a dualist are you a monest you might be um you know there are people who are dualists that go well yeah I think everything's biological but then I think there's a spirit above all of that right the brain um is part of the body and it's part of the you know it's it's kind of making all these experiences for you but then we also have the spirit above that um you know no right or wrong answers is kind of where you sit with that so this question answer to this question might determine which psychological perspective you adopt and this is important I I spend time talking about this because as we go through all the different perspectives and Fields in Psychology this semester you're going to see kind of the these different essentially different perspectives on looking at where a person's Behavior thoughts and feelings come from um you know why do they do what they do so um looking at kind of the answer to what's called The Mind Body problem we have to talk about Dart now Dart um you know if you're familiar with dart you know he said I think therefore I am um Dart spent a lot of time in what's called introspection which we'll talk about in a second um he would lay in bed all day and just try to think through problems so this was not an empirical type of way of collecting evidence but he would just try to think through problems and so um he was thinking a lot about this Mind Body problem which is what is really controlling um the person is it the Mind controlling the body is it the brain controlling the body or is it the body controlling the Mind well Dart said you know it's a little bit of both and so we call this cartisian dualism and there's a lot more to it I'm really simplifying it here but he said that there's an interaction between the body and the mind that they both influence one another it's not just one um you know in charge of the other so you can make Arguments for both of those so again this is important to understand as we go through understanding the history of psychology now the first person who really called themselves a psychologist was wilhem w vilhm w however you want to pronounce that we consider him to be the founder of psychology uh he was a physician and a neurophysiologist and he was from Germany um he was kind of consider him to be the first psychologist because he really was the first to establish an official psychology lab um and he did this in 1879 now he did a number of sensory perception experiments and that's what he was really interested in in doing so this is wound over here to the to the right um and you can see his experimental device that he had here uh and so he did it you know things all kinds of um experiments on himself experiments on his graduate students which we don't really recommend um but he was measuring to see how long it took people to press a telegraph key after hearing a ball hit a platform so that's what you're seeing here uh with this device um and he found some inter things he found that it would take a tenth of a second response when people were asked to press the key as soon as a sound occurred so the sound occurred they'd press the key and on average it would take people about one tenth of a second but then he'd ask and he'd rephrase the question a little bit differently he would say um press the key as soon as you are consciously aware of perceiving the sound and he found that this would take two t0 of a second so it doubled the time basically so he found that meta awareness so being aware of your awareness took longer um and from this he says well you know what it's things are not purely physiological there's got to be something else going on here so now we have psychology um because of this so he used these kinds of controlled experiments he used introspection um it's you know the place that we first started was really looking at kind of these inner processes a student of his of um wilham W was Edward B tier and this is where we have the kind of um schools of psychology that began so he had the School of Psychology called structuralism and with structuralism he would have himself and also his grad students because that's how he started out he'd have uh people kind of break their thoughts or their experiences into structures um he did this by using introspection kind of like thinking about you know their experiences self-analysis and also observation um so what he would have people do is he would play a sound or he would have some you know some kind of object to look at or whatnot um and as you were experiencing this trying to break it down into the elemental structures of your experience um now try this you can click on this this link here this is going to play um songs or not songs but a sound from um from the singing bowl from for meditation uh and just try to think what would that be like trying to write down what that was you know what the structures of that do you even know how you organize that well as you can imagine everybody would have a different example or a different experience of what that was like for them so this was not very objective it was not a very reliable method um you know even though titchner had quite a few graduate students uh this was kind of abandoned and uh psychology moved on from there um and it moved on a number of different ways but we talk first here about William James so William James um you know was a student of titcher uh we consider him to be the father of American psychology because he brought the ideas from Germany over to America he was the first one to do this he was influenced by wound um he was influenced by the you know research of Darwin or Darwin and um evolutionary theory and his school of thought or School of Psychology was called functionalism um now functionalism is basically looking at the functions of behaviors and so he said every Behavior has some kind of function and the function is to adapt to the environment so you can see very much evolutionary theory there so from here it's kind of a natural just um shift to looking at the first female who ever completed all of the requirements for a psychology PhD and that is Mary Whit and Calin she was a a student of James at Harvard um in fact when James brought her into his um graduate seminar all the the male students dropped out because they didn't want to be with a woman that tells you kind of the bias that was going on there um so she completed all the requirements uh she you know published papers she had her own lab she taught classes she did all of these things um yeah but could not receive the PHD because she was a woman and James says that her her dissertation was one of the best that he had ever seen um so some interesting kind of stories um from that and and so to give you an idea of kind of what she was looking at she uh was doing research on on memory um and she would kind of led the way for the the next uh female to actually got her PhD This was um Margaret Floy Washburn and so she was able to receive it actually there's something I wanted to tell you quickly um about Mary White and kin uh it's kind of interesting that Radcliffe uh you know the school for women uh offered her you know well we'll give you a PhD well which is kind of strange because it's an undergraduate um institution so they really had no business saying that they would offer her a PhD she refused it obviously so it was kind of like yeah no thanks um so we had uh Margaret Floy wasburn and I believe she did research um looking at experiences of animals which we usually incorporate in psychology as well um so Francis sner was the first African or black American male to receive a PhD he did so from Clark University in 1920 his adviser was Stanley Hall who I believe was a student of tiers um and he his his uh kind of of research was looking at racism and bias in particular looking at the psychological theories of the time that said that you know there was Intelligence kind of based on the color of your skin so the darker your skin the the less intelligent you were that was just the that was kind of the times and so he was rightly so was going and challenging those types of theories through his research that was his contribution uh so from here we talk about another school of thought uh um and we talk about first second and third Force psychology so first Force Psychology was psychoanalysis um Sigman Freud is kind of the the poster person uh for psychoanalysis we'll talk a lot about um Freud when we get to the personality chapter later in in the semester um and his emphasis was really on childhood experiences which hadn't been done before and also unconscious processes so up to this point you know the the schools of thought was kind of looking at the the conscious experiences of people this is the first to look at unconscious processes and how it influenced thoughts feelings and behaviors um so second Force psychology uh is behaviorism so this is the different the next School of Psychology uh kind of the heavy hitter for this particular uh school is John B Watson um John B Watson was like well you know what we're not gonna Focus anymore on introspection we're not going to focus on internal experiences we're only going to f Fus on observable Behavior so really was saying that all psychology needs to now look at observable Behavior so specifically looking at you know stimuli in the environment and how the organism is going to respond to that stimuli in the in the environment um he was very much influenced by Ivan Pavlov so Pavlov's dog if you've heard of that before I'm sure you have we'll talk a lot about this School of Psychology in detail later in the semester and the second person you need to know in terms of behaviorism is BF Skinner um again he emphasized observable Behavior nothing about Consciousness he wasn't concerned about Consciousness at all if you think of this the uh kind of the idea of the lab rat really comes from Skinner um and how people and and animals would uh respond to rewards and punishments and then third for psychology is humanistic psychology um Carl Rogers is one person that you need to know it's really responsible for basically taking um you know humanistic philosophy and moving it over to pschology so this is kind of a swing back to an emphasis on conscious experiences um they were really kind of uh disillusioned by the whole behavioral school I mean it dominated from 1920 to 1960 behaviorism dominated psychology that's a long time and I think we're still kind of feeling the effects of that uh so he said you know subjective experiences conscious experiences are very important to how people perceive the world how they perceive themselves he was a clinical psychologist so he was really focusing on um you know disorders and things like that and a big part of his uh you know humanistic psychology is really being the best that you can be looking at psych psychological growth and you know how do people grow how do they become their this fully functioning person we'll talk a lot um about humanistic psychology in Therapies in personality and also in motivation and the second person you need to know for humanistic psychology is Abraham maslo probably have seen um his theory of motivation called the hierarchy of needs and other topics um so if you seen the pyramid it starts out with kind of with physiological and it has the Pinnacle of self-actualization that's what we're talking about there we'll also talk a lot about him um in this class so now moving into more contemporary psychology we have to address the cognitive Revolution um so it's kind of where we are today um it's not really a school of thought anymore but um there was a cognitive Revolution kind of bringing back these um you know internal mental States how can we study these uh so you know the beginning with wound and all of you know his his graduate students looking at internal mental States they were doing this with inpection well the cognitive Revolution is saying well no we can do this in an empirical scientific way um so that's essentially what we're doing with cognitive psychology uh and so it's there's an umbrella term for any kind of mental state uh thinking uh memory dreaming uh so Linguistics computer models of the mind that have to do with memory those are just some of the things that we'll see in cognitive psychology and there's a number of different cognitive psychologists we have George Miller gome Chomsky which you might uh be familiar with his name he's a much older man now and he's kind of controversial but um these are some of the people that were involved uh in that so if you think of anything that's kind of a you know a mental state that you can't not directly observe that's kind of what we're talking about with cognitive psychology but we're doing it in a scientific kind of way so we'll mention a little bit about cross-cultural and gender psychology uh what do we mean by culture um just to kind of brush your me you know brush up your memory of this as we're looking at enduring behaviors ideas attitudes values traditions and the list goes on and on that are shared by a group of people it can be all kind of group you know any kind of group that you're looking at so everybody involves or anyone everyone is um kind of part of you know multiple cultures so it can be you know the area that you live it can be the country that you're in but it also can be a class that you're taking or your group of friends or the family that you're in the street that you live on so it encompasses a lot of different groups uh so usually one generation passes all of these um different characteristics on to the next and it really shapes us in a wide variety of ways so there's many characteristics that we have that were shaped by our culture um in fact I taught personality class last semester and your personality is actually limited by the culture that you're in so there's an infinite number of personalities that can be had across the globe but depending on what culture in you're in it's going to make some kind of um limitation there so cross-cultural psychology is studying culture and people around the world and those underlying processes many studies are from what we call weird cultures so those are Western industrial rich and Democratic uh this actually is does not represent I think it's like 10% of the world it's not very much in terms of um all the different cultures in the world but there's a lot of research done in weird weird cultures so a lot of um you know research is done in those cultures obviously so there's fewer studies of people that are from around the world and more research needs to be done but it kind of brings up an interesting uh question who should be doing the studying should it be people in the United States you know studying and comparing cultures all across the world is that objective um because we have our own biases and values or should people in their own cultures or in their own countries be studying you know their own but then can you really objective objectively observe what your cultur is anyway it's an interesting question to think about but um I like this quote that talks about kind of you know how we are like all other people we're like some other people and like no other person so we have unique aspects we have shared aspects and then we have aspects that everybody has the same um just a quick note uh we'll talk a little bit about um you know the influence of gender in this class not a whole lot but but a little bit um there's you know things are kind of um kind of up in arms right now in terms of how we talk about these things and so I don't want to do so in a way that's going to offend anybody um but we do know that gender identity and biological sex can influence development there's a number of different ways and so we will touch on that a little bit in this class so next is positive psychology um positive psychology has a lot in common with humanistic psychology so but this is the scientific study of human flourishing I would say that positive psychology is a little more empirical than humanistic psychology um the goals of positive psychology have are discovering and promoting strengths you know human strengths and virtues and these um human strengths and virtues can help individuals and communities Thrive to really be the best that they can so it's looking at all different kind of levels of society uh there's a number of different um psychologists so Martin Seligman uh Mah highly chick sent me high these are some others um that call for more research on human flourishing and there has been there's been a great answer to that call um and then kind of overall that you know if you're studying happiness you're going to study it under positive psychology um and they say that happiness is a byproduct of a pleasant engaged and um happy life which is a little bit redundant but so that's kind of an overview of kind of where we are in Psychology right now um again we don't really have schools of thought anymore we do have a number of different um levels of analysis and we also have perspectives and subfields so levels of analysis these are differing complimentary views for analyzing any given phenomenon so if we're looking at thoughts feelings and behaviors or thoughts or feelings or behaviors um we can do this in these three different levels so we can do this biologically psychologically or socio or social social cultural we can look at these different levels of analysis and it just kind of depends on what your question is and what field you're talking about so the bioc psychosocial approach is an integrated approach that incorporates all three levels of analysis I'll give you some examples of what we mean here um so this is showing these three different levels I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see that better um we have our biological influences I'm not going to go over each one of these but say something like genetic predisposition so the traits that you inherited so we can look at thoughts feelings and behaviors from you know the scientific study from this genetic predispositions kind of way H then we go over to psychological influences these are things that you might have learned in childhood so fears that you've learned expectations that you've learned patterns that you've learned um we're going going to kind of look and see how that influences the development of thoughts feelings and behaviors and then finally the social cultural you might see this as sociocultural depending on what you're looking at um the influences can be you know your culture your family expectations U your Society at large the friends that you had all these different influences and so you're looking at how all three of these things kind of go together to influence um you know why someone is acting the way that they are um why they're thinking or or feeling that the way that they are in terms of our definition of psychology um and so each level of the this analysis will offer a perspective for analyzing a behavior or mental process and it's important to know that it's incomplete by itself and that's really important to understand and I'm going to say that multiple times and multiple ways because there are individuals who think that only this matters only biology matters and that's great if they want to study it go for it um but they kind of think well you know these higher level psychology and um social social culture don't matter um when it does matter a lot all three of these matter so we to have a complete picture we need all three of these levels together again I'm not going to go through all of these um Al together for you but I think this is from the the Myers books so if you have the Myers book then you can look at this but if you don't if you're looking at the Oar you're going to have a little bit of a different take on this but I wanted to show you some of the different perspectives this is not exhaustive this is just a few of them um what the focus is of each of these perspective perspectives some sample research questions or some questions that people might want to answer and then some examples of subfields using those perspectives uh and so there's a lot of different fields that relate to the perspective so we'll give you an example here of um the cognitive perspective the focus is how we encode process store and retrieve information that's just one of them so that's looking at memory um and so the sample question is how do we use information in Remembering reasoning solving problems how's that information being used some of the sub fields that you would see with that type of perspective is cognitive Neuroscience it can be used in Clinical Psychology Counseling psychology it also can be used in industrial organizational psychology which is the psychology for business so that gives you an overview of some of the perspectives um and so moving on to the different subfields and that was kind of what I was showing in that last column um these involve different disciplines and a wide and wide ranging interest um and so they're focused on describing and explaining behavior in the mind that's kind of the again it's the goal um and oftentimes you'll see these subfields found in two categories they can either be for basic research or for Applied research basic research is um what you'll see with you know biological psychology developmental how people you know how how infants and children um develop cognitive Personality and Social um and so that's basically just you know doing research for the sake of gaining information you want to find out information there's no specific purpose that you're trying to you know aim towards but you just want to find more information applied research is there's usually some kind of um you know job or entity that you have some kind of question that you're going to be using specifically um for that particular FEI field so things like industrial organization like I said with business you want you're going to take whatever you learn in Psychology and you're going to apply that in a business setting counseling clinical like I said Community but also educational that's that's a big one too um educational psychology uh so this is just what I like to use to me this is helpful uh to kind of understanding the different perspectives and subfields of psychology uh and so if you're looking at one perspective or one subfield you are looking at a specific psychological aspect um you know exclusively and so um so say you have an orange or a chocolate orange in this case um and you say you know what I want to study personality so you're going to study personality at the exclusion of all the other things so you know biological uh behavioral psychodynamic all these other slices and so you can imagine that all the slices represent kind of you know all the behavior thoughts and feelings but you're just going to study the one little slice and let other people do the other part um so it doesn't mean that one is more important than the other um we need all of them together to make up that now if that doesn't work for you I have another analogy and this is like using as puzzle pieces right so each of the perspectives explains some but not all of behavior and mental processes not one perspective is more correct than the other so again we don't usually see like a whole Ian we haven't got to the point where we can you know see everything about a human being but we can approximate and kind of put these pieces together to try to kind of see what's going on um with people and it's it's a never ending um you in terms of science it's never ending we're always finding new information we find out that we're wrong we'll talk about that in the next chapter or in the next module um and finding out new information constantly and updating what we know about that um so that's the end of this section so uh come back for part two and we'll talk more about the scientific method um and I will talk to you guys in the next one