Download Strengths

Biological
Key Concepts:
- Reductionism/determinism:
- Environmental Importance: Plomin and others, 1988,91,94: identical
twins raised separately recall their parents’ warmth very similarly, more so
than fraternal twins (even fraternal twins raised in the same family)
- Genetic Importance: Plomin and others, 1996: a person whose identical
twin has Alzheimer’s has a 60% chance of getting it; a person whose
fraternal twin has it only has a 30% chance
- Genetic Importance: McGue and Bouchard, 1998: people who grow up
together (biologically related or not) do not much resemble each other in
personality.
Localization v. Lateralization
- Localization: Roger Sperry, ~1974: Studied split brain patients with
epilepsy…found that information is shared between two hemispheres, but
that there are specific functions for each side
- Localization: Paul Broca, ~1861: discovered Broca’s Area, a section in
the left hemisphere responsible for producing speech
- Lateralization: Karl Lashley, early 20th century: damaged certain
sections of rats’ brains to show that memory was spread out over the entire
brain
Basic Assumptions:
- All that is psychological is first physiological.
- All behavior has a cause - deterministic
- Human genes have evolved over millions of years to adapt behavior to the
environment. Therefore, much behavior has a genetic basis.
-for all of those: - McGue and Bouchard, 1998: people who grow up
together (biologically related or not) do not much resemble each other in
personality.
- Psychology should investigate the brain, nervous system, endocrine system,
neurochemistry, and genes
- Paul Broca, ~1861: discovered Broca’s Area, a section in the left
hemisphere responsible for producing speech
- Karl Lashley, early 20th century: damaged certain sections of rats’ brains
to show that memory was spread out over the entire brain
- Animals may be studied as a means of understanding human behavior.
Pros:
- unethical to test potentially bad things on human beings
- controlled experiments involve controlling all variables, in a lab;
this can’t be done on a human
- it helps humans
- more available drugs to treat both humans and animals
Cons:
- suffering outweighs the benefits
- animal tests aren’t always an accurate prediction of effects
- animals can’t consent
Strengths
- The approach is very scientific.
- Practical applications have been extremely effective
Weaknesses
- Reductionist approach- may ignore other factors
- it doesn’t explain consciousness and emotion
- Biopsychological theories often over-simplify the huge complexity of physical
systems and their interaction with the environment.
Learning
Key Concepts:
- Radical Behaviorism: everything (including thinking and feeling) we do is a
behavior
- Classical conditioning: involves repeatedly pairing an unconditioned stimulus
with a neutral stimulus
- UCS: naturally/instinctually evokes response (the UCR)
- UCR: naturally/instinctually occurs due to UCS
- NS: the stimulus that is eventually paired with the UCS…eventually
elicits UCR
- CS: NS -> CS after conditioning
-CR: the UCR in response to the NS (in the absence of the UCS)
- Ivan Pavlov, 1890s: conditioned dogs to salivate to a buzzer by
repeatedly pairing the buzzer with food (which naturally evoked
the spit)
- John B. Watson, 1920: Little Albert…conditioned a young boy to
fear rabbits, dogs, and wool by repeatedly pairing them with
something that would naturally evoke fear (a loud noise)
- Operant Conditioning: the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and
form of behavior
- Wolfgang Köhler, 1910s: observed that chimpanzees learned how
to combine boxes to reach bananas
- Edward Thorndike, 1901: put cats in “puzzle boxes”…with
experience, they got out faster; this led to the Law of Effect
- Reinforcement: causes a behavior to occur more frequently
- Positive: a behavior is followed by a pleasant stimulus
-Negative: a behavior is followed by the removal of a bad stimulus
- Punishment: causes a behavior to occur less
- Positive: behavior is followed by a bad stimulus
- Negative: behavior is followed by the removal of a good stimulus
- Avoidance Learning: learning that a certain behavior results in a bad
stimulus ending (shielding your eyes from the sun)
- Extinction: lack of any consequence following a behavior; decreases
behavior
- The Law of Effect: basically the pleasure principal
- Edward Thorndike, 1901: put cats in “puzzle boxes”…with experience,
they got out faster; this led to the Law of Effect
- Social Learning Theory: Albert Bandura; people learn by watching what others
do and that human thought processes are central to understanding personality
- Bobo Doll experiment: Bandura, 1961: children are MUCH more
likely to verbally/physically attack a “Bobo doll” if they see an
adult do it first
- representative-ness heuristic: categorizations are based on the extent to
which someone’s behavior represents a category we have of various social
groups
- availability heuristic: We attempt to bring to mind examples of behaviors
of people, and the easier we can imagine such examples, the more likely
we will think those behaviors will occur.
- Learned helplessness: a psychological condition in which a human or animal has
learned to believe that it is helpless
- Martin Seligman, 1965: observed that dogs “gave up” after the
researchers conditioned the dogs to associate a flash with an inescapable
shock; the dogs no longer attempted to cross the barrier that would have
saved them
- Finkelstein and Ramey, 1977: two groups of babies; one was given
control over a mobile, one wasn’t. After both were conditioned, the
groups were switched…the babies that were not originally given control
never learned to control the mobile.
- Imprinting: any kind of phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a
particular age or a particular life stage) that is rapid and apparently independent of
the consequences of behavior
- Konrad Lorenz, early 1900s: discovered a 36-hour imprinting period in
geese…the geese would follow him around.
- Latent Learning: a form of learning that is not immediately expressed in an overt
response; it occurs without obvious reinforcement to be applied later.
- Tolman and C.H. Honzik,1930: demonstrated latent learning in rats by
placing food at the end of a maze after a ten-day “learning period” with no
food; after placing the food at the end, the rats’ time to complete the maze
was drastically reduced.
Basic Assumptions:
- The majority of behavior is learned from the environment after birth.
- Psychology should investigate the laws and products of learning.
- Behavior is determined by the environment, since we are the total of all our past
learning experiences, freewill is an illusion.
- Only observable behaviors should be studied if psychology is to be objective.
- There is an innate predisposition to learning.
- Learning can take place in the absence of reinforcement
Strengths
- very scientific
- reductionist
- many practical applications
Weaknesses
- Heavy reliance on animal research - discounts the qualitative difference between
humans and non-human animals
- Ignores important mental processes involved in learning.
- Highly deterministic.
- Questionable ecological validity (almost all experiments done in a lab)
Cognitive