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Early Beginnings: Rene Descartes Figure 1: Descartes’ famous saying: “I think, therefore I am.” — For hundreds of years medieval Christian churches felt the human mind, like God, was an unsolvable mystery. Descartes was the first to start the trek into our own mind. He was a firm believer in the power of introspection. — Rene Descartes argued that human sensations and behaviors were based on activity in the nervous system. Write out an “I am poem” about yourself. What do you like? What are your passions/interests? Structuralism: Psychology is becoming a Science. Figure 2 Wilhelm Wundt 1832-1929 — Wilhelm Wundt (Voont) was the first to declare himself a psychologist. Structuralists- concerned with discovering the basic elements of consciousness. Objective sensations. (taste, sight) things most can experience. Subjective feelings. (emotional responses and mental images) reactions that only you can have. Structuralism: — Relies on introspection, or the process of reporting your own conscious mental experiences. Take a look at the objects below. What do you see? What are they? What do you think of when you see these objects? How do they make you feel? Functionalism: Another model rises Figure 3: William James 1842-1910 — Functionalism- A theory about functions of consciousness and the ways consciousness helps people adapt to their environment. — Experience is a stream of consciousness. — Mental processes help organisms adapt to their environment. You think about how and why something is used, not its parts — We repeat actions which become habits. But habits must begin by giving our full attention to learn it to begin with. (riding a bike, driving) When you learned how to ride a bike or to drive a car, what factors motivated you to do so? Behaviorism: Maybe the mind is a big mystery after all! Figure 4: John B. Watson 1878-1958 — Psychology should only deal with observable events: stimuli from the environment and the organism’s response to that stimuli. — Thought of the mind as a black box which could not be opened or understood. — Consciousness is a “private event” known only to the individual — If we can’t understand it, we shouldn’t try to guess what role it has in our actions. — Watson defined Psychology as the scientific study of observable behavior. No more, no less. How would you explain the difference between Functionalism and Behaviorism? B.F. Skinner and Reinforcement: Figure 5: B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) — Showed that when an animal is reinforced (rewarded) for doing something then it’s more likely to do it again in the future. — Called Operant Conditioning — Skinner felt that people learn to behave because they have been reinforced for doing so. In what ways have your teachers used reinforcement in the classroom? Gestalt Philosophy: The anti-structuralism Figure 6: Ebbinghaus illusion or Titchener circles —Gestalt psychology tries to understand how the brain works by studying perception and perceptual thinking. —Gestalt Psychologists examine how our minds use context clues to tell us what we are looking at. —Two main beliefs of Gestalt Philosophy: —We perceive things relative to what is around them. —The larger picture will be seen before its component parts Take a look at the circles above. Which of the circles in the middle is larger? Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis Figure 7: Sigmund Freud, the Godfather of Modern Psychology — Mental disorders result from conflicts of the unconscious mind — Behavior comes from conflicts and experience in which we may have no memory. — Freud says the mind is like a mental boiler which holds the rising pressure of unconscious sexual and destructive desires, along with memories of traumatic events. — Free Association: Patients recline and talk about thoughts, wishes, memories dreams, or whatever else comes to mind. The analyst interprets the thoughts. Freud believed that dreams were our mind trying to put make sense of everything going on in our mind. What was the most recent dream that you remember? Why do you think that you dreamed about this? Freud’s three levels of consciousness: o Id: Bottom of the iceberg, our most basic instincts. The Id acts on its own, without conscious thought. (I WANT IT NOW!!) o Superego: Bridges the gap between the Id and the Ego. Superego is concerned with social rules and morals—similar to what many people call their "conscience" or their "moral compass." (If I take what I want, what will people think of me??) o Ego: the rational, pragmatic part of our personality. It is less primitive than the id and is partly conscious and partly unconscious. It's what Freud considered to be the "self," and its job is to balance the demands of the id and superego in everyday life. (Okay, what can I do to get what I want?) You are walking around campus and you see that someone has somehow managed to get Cook Out for lunch. You love Cook Out. You now realize that you really, really want some Cook Out. How does each level of consciousness respond to this situation?