Introduction to Psychology Exam 1 Study Guide, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Psychology

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Introduction to Psychology Exam 1 Study Guide

FORMAT

● 50 multiple choice questions ○ Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 ○ Lecture and textbook information CHAPTER 1: HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY ● Psychology is the study of mind and behavior ○ Mind - private, subjective, behavior - what you can see ● Nativism vs. empiricism ○ Nativism (nature) - introduced by Plato, everything about you is given at birth ○ Empiricism (nurture) - introduced by Aristotle, tabula rasa, created over time ● Wilhelm Wundt - father of psychology, psychology is scientific discipline, structuralism ○ Focusing on how the mind is organized, specific elements in the brain ○ Relied on people about subjective experience, self-report, introspection ■ Used this to understand how the mind was organized ■ Lacked validity, wasn’t related to the things he said ● William James - functionalism ○ Focusing on the purpose of the mental processes, why do we do what we do ○ Interested in learning and memory ● Sigmund Freud - psychoanalytic theory ○ Unconscious mental processes shape mind and behavior ● Cognitive psychology - study of mental processes, learning, perception, thought, memory, experience, influenced by computer and information processing ○ Ex. optical illusions and what that reveals ● Evolutionary psychology - studying the mind and behavior and its adaptive value ○ Ex. purpose of emotions, why we have certain biases ● Social psychology - studies causes and consequences of social relationships, how the way we interact with people, and need for relationships affects our mind and behavior ○ Ex. bystander bias ● Cultural psychology - how cultures reflect and shape our psychological processes CHAPTER 2: METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY ● Operational definition - how we’re going to measure the thing we’re interested in ○ Description in some sort of concrete measurable term ○ Ex. social media use → how many hours ● Independent variable - thing that is going to cause other things to happen, predictor, variable that is being manipulated

● Dependent variable - outcome, variable that is being measure ● Measures → reliability, validity, power ○ Reliability - consistency of the measurement, does it produce same measurement every time if it were to be repeated ○ Validity - extent to which a measurement accurately reflects concept ○ Power - ability to detect change ● Demand characteristics - aspects of settings that make people behave in the way that they think they should behave in the setting ○ Something from the setting changes behavior ○ Way to avoid → naturalistic behavior ■ Observing people “out in the wild” ● Correlation - how one variable systematically changes with another variable, relationship ○ CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION ■ Doesn’t account for outside factors, third-variable problem ● Confounding variable - the 3rd variable ● Ex. ice cream and drowning correlation ○ Positive correlation - if one variable increases, the other variable increases and vice versa, one decreases, other decreases as well ○ Negative correlation - if one variable decreases, the other variable increases and vice versa, one increase, other decreases ● Biases that happen in experiments ○ Observer bias - researchers accidentally, inadvertently influence outcome ■ Avoided by double blind observation - neither researcher nor participant knows who is in what group ■ Also avoided by naturalistic studies - observation in the world ● Experimental vs. control group ● Case study - observing one individual person ● Ethics in psychological research ○ Informed consent - person knows everything that’s going to go on ○ No coercion ○ Protection from harm ○ Risk-benefit ratio - benefits outweigh the risks ■ Risks have to be worth the benefits to society ○ Deception ○ Debriefing ○ Confidentiality CHAPTER 3: NEUROSCIENCE AND BEHAVIOR ● Biological view of nature, biology changes in response to environment ● Neuron - cells in the brain and spinal cord

○ Parts of the neuron - cell body, dendrites, synapse, terminal buttons, axon (myelin sheath - insulation) ■ Demyelination can cause issues (ex. multiple sclerosis) ● How to neurons communicate with each other ○ Action potential - electrical signal, neurotransmitters ■ Depolarization (outside negative, inside positive) ■ Repolarization (inside negative, outside positive) ● Motor neurons - carries signals from environment, to spinal cord, to muscles to move ● Sensory neurons - takes in information from outside world, to spinal cord, to brain ○ Ex. tactile information ● Mirror neurons - empathy, neurons fire both when someone is performing action and when watching someone else perform same action ○ Neurons for performing an action and seeing action are the same ● Interneuron - connect sensory, motor, and other neurons ○ Communication between all different neurons ● Synapse - gap between two neurons where they can communicate ○ 4 ways in which neurotransmitters enter and leave the synapse ■ Chemicals combine to receptors on postsynaptic neuron ■ Enzyme deactivation - stuck in synapse, deactivated by enzyme ■ Autoreceptor binding - presynaptic neuron autoreceptors hold on to neurotransmitters until postsynaptic neuron is ready to take them in ■ Reuptake - released into gap, sucked back to presynaptic neuron ● Different types of neurotransmitters ○ Glutamate - excitatory, speeds up transmission between neurons ■ GABA - stops firing of neurons ■ High levels of glutamate, low level GABA → seizures ○ Acetylcholine - voluntary motor control, sleep, attention, memory, learning ■ Low levels leads to memory impairments → alzheimer's ○ Serotonin - sleep regulation, wakefulness, eating, aggressive behavior ○ Dopamine - motor behavior, motivation, pleasure, makes us want to do things ■ High levels → schizophrenia ■ Low levels → Parkinson’s ○ Norepinephrine - influences mood and arousal ■ Low levels result in mood disorders → anxiety, depression ○ Endorphins - pain pathways, emotion centers ■ Low levels → OCD ● Human nervous system ○ Central nervous system - brain and spinal cord ■ Receives signals from outside world

○ Peripheral nervous system - connects central nervous system to body ■ Autonomic - controls blood pressure, body organs, etc. ● Automatic body processes ● Sympathetic - prepares body for action ● Parasympathetic - calming, resting state ■ Somatic - conveys information into and out of CNS ● Voluntary control ● Different divisions/lobes of the brains ○ Hindbrain - controls basic functions of life, back, shared with nonhuman animals ■ Damage → coma ■ Cerebellum - fine motor skills ■ Reticular formation - regulates sleep, wakefulness, and levels of arousal ■ Medulla - heart rate, circulation, respiration ■ Pons - relays information from cerebellum to rest of brain ○ Midbrain - allows orientation in environment, arousal at a basic level, movement, shared with nonhuman animals ■ Tectum - orients organism in the environment ■ Tegmentum - movement and arousal ○ Forebrain - executive, advanced functions, not shared with all nonhuman animals ■ Thalamus - intakes sensory information, sends information to other parts of brain, inhibits sensory processes ■ Corpus callosum - connects two hemispheres of brain, allows communication between them ■ Limbic system - involved in motivation, emotion, learning, memory ● Hippocampus - creating new memories, integrating them ● Amygdala - processes emotions, especially fear ● HPA access - response to stress ● Hypothalamus - regulates hunger and thirst ○ Works with pituitary gland (master gland) ■ Reproductive processes, digestion ■ Cerebral cortex and the lobes - processing sensory information, response to the environment ● Occipital lobe - processes visual information, other parts define and interpret this information ● Temporal lobe - auditory information, recognition of objects ○ Broca’s area - language ● Parietal lobe - processes tactile information, spatial orientation ● Frontal lobe - critical thinking, abstract thinking, planning, judgement ● Split-brain issue - corpus callosum is damaged, no communication between the two

○ Ex. recognition of the key, tell you what it is, can’t pick it up ● Brain plasticity ○ Sensory cortices can adapt to change ○ Functions assigned to certain areas of brain may be capable of being reassigned to other areas of the brain to accommodate changing input from environment ● Phineas Gage - damage to frontal lobe ○ Personality changed, emotions changed ● fMRI - measuring blood flow in the brain ○ Can see areas of the brain that are working when doing a certain task CHAPTER 5: CONSCIOUSNESS ● Consciousness - person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind ● 4 properties of consciousness ○ Intentionality - being directed toward an object ○ Unity - pulling it all together, integrating all of the information, making sense of it ■ Ex. multitasking - switching attention ■ Automaticity - performance of a skill that has been practiced repeatedly that eventually is executed with little or no direct attention ● The Stroop Effect ○ Selectivity - attention, capacity to include some objects but not others ■ Ex. cocktail-party phenomenon ■ Change blindness ○ Transience - tendency to change, stream of consciousness, focus changes ● 2 main problems with consciousness ○ Problem of other minds - no way to detect and perceive consciousness of others ○ Mind-body problem - how is the mind related to the body and the brain ● Levels of consciousness ○ Minimal consciousness - low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior (ex. sleep) ○ Full consciousness - you know and are able to report your mental state ○ Self-consciousness - attention is drawn to self as an object, self-awareness ● Default network - there are things going on in brain when doing nothing ○ Resting state activation, involved in identity and ideas about the self, daydreaming, self consciousness ○ Less active in people with autism, more active in people with schizophrenia ● Conscious contents ○ Mental control - attempt to control conscious states of mind ○ Thought suppression - conscious avoidance of a thought ■ Rebound effect of thought suppression - tendency of a thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following suppression ○ Ironic processes of mental control - mental processes that can produce ironic

errors because monitoring for errors can itself produce them ● Freud and other cognitive psychologists ○ Dynamic unconsciousness (Freud) - hidden memories, a person’s deepest instincts and desires, the person’s inner struggle to control these forces ■ Repression - mental process of removing unwanted thoughts or memories ○ Cognitive unconsciousness - mental processes that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, behavior even though not experienced by the person ● Stages of sleep and types of brain waves associated with them (see diagram) ○ Stage 1 - theta waves ○ Stage 2 - sleep spindles, K-complexes ○ Stage 3 and 4 - delta waves, slow wave sleep ○ Stage 5 - REM sleep, sawtooth waves ● Sleep disorders ○ Insomnia - trouble falling asleep or staying asleep ○ Sleep apnea - when a person stops breathing for brief periods while asleep ○ Narcolepsy - sudden sleep attacks occur in middle of waking activities ○ Night terrors - abrupt awakenings with panic and intense emotional arousal ■ Common in children ○ Sleep paralysis - waking up unable to move ○ Sleep walking - getting up and moving while asleep, walking somewhere ● Hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of sleep ○ Hypnagogic - pre-sleep consciousness ○ Hypnopompic - post-sleep, groggy ● Drugs and consciousness ○ Drug dependence - not having the drug causes physical or psychological problems, dependent on the drug to feel “right” ○ Drug tolerance - tendency for larger doses of the drug to be required over time to achieve the same effect ○ Drug withdrawal - problems arise when drug is taken away ● Depressants and stimulants and their effect on the nervous system ○ Depressants - reduce activity of CNS, calming, induce sleepiness, can arrest breathing in really high doses ○ Stimulants - excite the CNS, heighten arousal and activity levels