PSY.LECT1 what_is_psychology_part_1 pptx - د.برجان

Introduction to General PsychologyWhat is Psychology?Part 1

د.برجان هاشم طه
Psychiatrist
MBChB MSc CAP FICMS(psych)

Psychology Definition:

Let we ask ourselves some question?
e.g. why do some people lie? Why people love sex? Why you hate studying?
Why do some people kill people, Why others save lives?
Why some keep going , others are shy?
Why you smoke? may be related to oral habit of oral psycho-sexual stage of Frued

Psychology: is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

There are three aspects to this definition: science, behavior, and mental processes.
As a science, psychology uses systematic methods to observe, describe, predict, and explain behavior.
Behavior is everything we do that can be directly observed
Mental processes are the thoughts, feelings, and motives that each of us experiences privately but that cannot be observed directly.

Course of this year

Theory lectures 1 hour per week every wed. 11.30am-12.20pm

ensure attendance for better understanding

Ask and discuss

2 lecturers (may be 3)

Course of this year

Short seminar presentations
And / or
Research program participation

Exams: mid year 40 marks and final 60 (can include quizzes, research, seminars)

Different assessment methods: MCQ, T&F, explains, talk about, …etc

The Beginnings of Psychology as a Science

A. From Philosophy to Psychology

For centuries, philosophers enjoyed arguing questions like these: How do we acquire knowledge? Does information come to us through our senses and our experiences with the environment, or is it inborn?

Psychologists always have searched for more concrete evidence than philosophers.
Philosophers think about thinking.
So do psychologists, but psychologists also do something else. They systematically obtain and interpret evidence about thinking.

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H

How Psychology born?

Wundt (1832-1920), developed the first scientific laboratory of psychology in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany (Wundt was studying awareness of immediate experiences, or what psychologists call consciousness ).

Titchener (1876-1927),a student of Wundt's developed structuralism, classification of the mind's structures. ) hydrogen and oxygen as structures of a chemical compound, and on other hand the sensations and thoughts as structures of the mind(.

James, the first psychologist in the United States emphasized the functions of the mind in adapting to the environment. His view was called functionalism.

What are Early and Contemporary Approaches to Psychology? Or

What are the general psychology schools?

Now if we bring a snake here and put it in front of this class .. What are you going to do? Answers
So different reactions…. Like this there are different approaches to psychology

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This approach emphasizes the scientific study of behavior and how environment determine behavior.

Pavlov and Skinner

Pavlov's experiments on observation of the behavior following manipulation of the environment. If I make this room so noisy what are you going to do?
B. F. Skinner looking into the mind from the determinants of behavior and the external environment. If you get more than 70 in mid year  you will get additional 10 marks

Behavioral Approaches

According to behaviorists:

we do well in school because of the rewards we experience; we behave in a well-mannered fashion for our parents because of the controls they place on us; and we work hard at our jobs because of the money we receive for our effort.

So our behaviors are not because of an inborn motivation to be a competent person. but

We do them because of the environmental conditions we have experienced and are continuing to experience.

Social cognitive theory, as proposed by Albert Bandura (1986, 1998), stresses that behavior is determined not only by its controlling environmental conditions but also by how thoughts modify the impact of environment on behavior.

Behavioral Approaches

Behaviorism

Scientific Psychology should focus on
observable behavior.
John Watson
(1878-1958)
Ivan Pavlov
Psych the Science of Behavior

Stimulus

Response
Psychology
Mental Processes cannot
be studied directly
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Watson (1878-1958)
Behavior without Reference to Thought
S-R Psychology

B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)

Reward effect on behavior

Science of Observable

Behavior

Behaviorism

Gestalt Psychology

Max Wertheimer
(1880-1943)
“The whole is different than
the sum of its parts.”

Illusion of movement created by

presenting visual stimuli in rapid
succession.
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Psychoanalytic Approach
This approach stresses the unconscious aspects of mind, conflict between biological instincts and society's demands, and early childhood experiences.

Freud was the main person of psychoanalytic theory.

For Freud, the key to understanding mind and behavior rested in the unconscious aspects of mind—the aspects of which we are unaware.

Freud compared the human mind to an iceberg.

The conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg, the portion above water; the unconscious mind is the huge bulk of the iceberg, the portion under water.

Psychoanalytic Approach

Freud (1917) believed that unlearned biological instincts influence the way individuals think, feel, and behave. These instincts, especially sexual and aggressive impulses, often conflict with the demands of society.

Erik Erikson (1968) . Erikson believes we progress through a series of personality stages over the human life span, unlike Freud, who thought personality is completed by 5 years of age.

Unconscious expressed in

dreams & “slips of the tongue”
Freud & Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
Proposes the idea of the UNCONSCIOUS
Thoughts, memories & desires
exist below conscious awareness
and exert an influence on our
behavior
Psychoanalytic Theory attempts to explain
personality, mental disorders & motivation in
terms of unconscious determinants of behavior
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Humanistic Approach
This approach emphasizes a person's capacity for personal growth, freedom to choose, and positive qualities.

Humanistic psychologists opposite to behaviorists, saying that individuals have the ability to control their lives rather than be manipulated by the environment.

Carl Rogers (1961) and Abraham Maslow (1971)

Maslow stressed the importance of achieving our needs. Maslow called humanistic psychology the "third force" in psychology, believing it deserved the attention accorded the first two forces, behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory.

Abraham Maslow

Cognitive Approach
The cognitive approach emphasizes the mental processes involved in knowing:
A person's mind is viewed as an active problem-solving system.
How we direct our attention, how we perceive, how we remember, and how we think and solve problems.
For example, cognitive psychologists want to know how we solve algebraic equations, why we remember some things only for a short time but remember others for a lifetime, and how we can use imagery to plan for the future.

Cognitive Approach

Information processing psychologists study how individuals process information—how they attend to information, how they perceive it, how they store it, how they think about it, and how they retrieve it for further use.

Herbert Simon (1969) was among the pioneers of the information-processing approach.

Cognitive Psychology

Noam Chomsky
“Language”
Advent of computers (late 1950s) provides
a new model for thinking about the mind
Cognitive Psychologists return
to the study of learning,
memory, perception, language,
development & problem solving
Cognition the mental processes
involved in acquiring, processing,
storing & using information

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Psychology (1960s-1990s)

Psychology
Science of Behavior
& Mental Processes

Cognitive Y

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

The Dynamic Unconscious Mind
Psychoanalysis

Computers as Metaphor for Mind

Study Mind through Inferences Drawn
From Observable Behavior
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