Download What is Psychology

‫برجان هاشم طه‬.‫د‬
Psychiatrist
MBChB MSc CAP FICMS(psych)
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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.
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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)
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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
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The Beginnings of Psychology as a Science
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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.
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• 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?
• So different reactions…. Like this there are
different approaches to psychology
Answers
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Behavioral Approaches
• 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
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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.
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Behaviorism
Scientific Psychology should focus on
observable behavior.
Psych the Science of Behavior
John Watson
(1878-1958)
Mental Processes cannot
be studied directly
Stimulus
Response
Psychology
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Ivan Pavlov
Behaviorism
Science of Observable
Behavior
Watson (1878-1958)
Behavior without Reference to Thought
S-R Psychology
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990)
Reward effect on behavior
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Gestalt Psychology
“The whole is different than
the sum of its parts.”
Max Wertheimer
(1880-1943)
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Illusion of movement created by
presenting visual stimuli in rapid
succession.
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.
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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.
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Freud & Psychoanalysis
Proposes the idea of the UNCONSCIOUS
Thoughts, memories & desires
exist below conscious awareness
and exert an influence on our
behavior
Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939)
Unconscious expressed in
dreams & “slips of the tongue”
Psychoanalytic Theory attempts to explain
personality, mental disorders & motivation in
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terms
of unconscious determinants of behavior
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.
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Abraham Maslow
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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.
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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.
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Cognitive Psychology
Cognition the mental processes
involved in acquiring, processing,
storing & using information
Cognitive Psychologists return
to the study of learning,
memory, perception, language,
development & problem solving
Noam Chomsky
“Language”
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Advent of computers (late 1950s) provides
a new model for thinking about the mind
Psychology (1960s-1990s)
Psychology
Science of Behavior
& Mental Processes
Cognitive Y
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
The Dynamic Unconscious Mind
Psychoanalysis
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Computers as Metaphor for Mind
Study Mind through Inferences Drawn
From Observable Behavior