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General Psychology Chapter 1

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Definition of Psychology Psychology: the science of behavior and mental processes. * Science * Attempt to understand people by thinking critically about careful, controlled observations. * Behavior * Refers to all of a person’s overt actions that can be directly observed. * Mental Processes * Refers to the private thoughts, emotions, feelings, and motives that other people can not directly observe. Goals of Psychology (4) * Describe: Identifying and classifying behaviors and mental processes as accurately as possible. * Understand: Proposing reasons for behaviors/mental processes. * Predict: Offering predictions (or hypotheses) about how a given condition or set of conditions will affect …show more content…

* The functions of the mind, not its raw elements, were the subject matter of psychology for the functionalists. Contemporary Psychological Perspectives * The view of modern psychologists are frequently difficult to categorize into traditional schools of thought. * Psychological Perspectives: general points of view used for explaining people’s behavior and thinking, whether normal or abnormal. Behaviorism * Behaviorism: The school of psychology that views observable, measureable behavior and emphasizes the key role of the environment as a determinant of a behavior. * Ivan Pavlov (behaviorist) – Started the idea of conditioning, where an inherited reflex comes to be triggered by a stimulus that has nothing to do with that reflex. He showed that even inherited reflexes could be influenced dramatically by learning experiences. * John Watson (1878-1958) postulated that concepts such as the mind, consciousness, and feelings are neither objective or measurable. * B. .F Skinner (1904-1990) argued that these concepts are not needed to explain behavior. One can explain behavior, he claimed, by analyzing the conditions that are present before a behavior occurs and then analyzing the consequences that follow the behavior. (operant conditioning: reinforcement) Psychoanlysis * Psychoanalysis: technique of helping people with emotional problems based on Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind (based on

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