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Samenvatting Psychology by Ronald Comer
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A summary of most of the chapters of the book 'Psychology' by Ronald Comer, Elisabeth Gould and Adrian Furnham.
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Chapter 1 – Psychology: Yesterday and TodayWhat is Psychology?
Psychology studies what people do from different perspectives (mind, behaviour
most dominant). The goals of psychology are to describe, explain, predict and
control behaviour and mental processes. Some psychologists argue that we also
need to study how people understand and develop. The study of psychology
must occur at multiple levels: brain (intra-individual), person (inter-individual),
group (inter-group) and the level of culture (societal).
Psychology’s Roots in Philosophy
Many Ancient Greeks were interested in identifying what distinguishes the living
from the dead and what distinguishes human beings from other living beings.
They speculated that these differences were the result of humans having or
being psuche, or ‘souls’, and put forward different accounts of the relationship
between the soul and the body, the persistence or otherwise of the soul after
death and how the soul can come to know the world. From the word ‘psuche’ we
eventually got ‘psych’ of psychology.
Most well-known Greek thinkers:
Socrates: left no written work so we only know of him through his pupil Plato.
Socrates cultivated the idea of living an ‘examined’ life, during which one must
question authority and receive opinion and put arguments to the test through the
employment of logic.
Plato: Argued that we live in a world of endlessly shifting shadows and that
philosophers could show us how to move out of these shadows to a sunlit world
of pure, eternal knowledge. Plato likened the human predicament to a charioteer
trying to drive and control two wild and powerful horses. One horse represented
our appetites; the other, pride and passion. The charioteer represented reason.
The bodily seat of reason was in the brain. The world around us was temporary
and cruel and should be escaped.
Aristotle: Found the world to be a never-ending source of wonder. One of his
basic theories was that there were different kinds of souls and these souls could
be placed in a hierarchy. The simplest soul is the ‘vegetative’ soul found in
plants, animals have a ‘vegetative’ soul and a ‘sensitive’ soul and humans have
one more soul, the ‘rational’ soul. This rational soul is capable of reflection and
language.
Hippocrates: A Greek physician, argued that the universe was built op from four
elements: fire, water, earth and air. These elements were found in the body in
the form of humours – four bodily fluids. A person’s particular combination of
humours, determined their character and well-being and predicted their
responses to various situations. Hippocrates also correctly identified the brain as
the organ of mental life.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, two great philosophical traditions emerged, the
rationalists (Descartes), who stressed the importance of clear and distinct ideas
which could only be identified by ignoring our senses and the empiricists, who
argued that sensory information is all that we have and that knowledge must be
traced back to the sensations that cause them.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, psychological and medical knowledge was
developing and anatomists began to map the brain and the structure of the
,nervous system. German scientists like Müller and von Helmholtz, advanced the
process of mapping the brain and the structure of the nervous system.
The Founding of Psychology
The first psychology laboratory was founded in Leipzig, by
physiologist/philosopher Wilhelm Wundt. He was interested in human
consciousness and will, which he studied by asking trained experimental
participants to observe their conscious activity under carefully controlled
conditions. He made a distinction between experimental psychology, which was
limited to the study of simple sensory processes, and Völkerpsychologie, which
studied higher cognitive processes that were the product of cultures, language
and history.
William James was the first to establish a psychology laboratory in the US (at
Harvard) and helped to shift the field’s focus to the functions of mental events
and behaviour, forming a school of thought know as functionalism.
Gestalt psychologists studied human tendencies to perceive pattern, putting
together the ‘parts’, or individual sensations, to create a ‘whole’ or perception
that went beyond the sum of the parts.
Over the years, different fields of psychology emerged, with different ideas about
what was the appropriate area of study for human psychology. Some of the most
influential fields were the psychoanalytic, behaviourist, humanistic, cognitive and
neuroscience schools of thought.
Sigmund Freud was a Viennese neurologist who suggested that many of our
thoughts and feelings existed beyond the realm of conscious awareness and
could not be revealed by introspection. This unconscious mind is organized
around basic and often socially unacceptable desires. To stress how alien these
desires are to our normal selves, Freud called this part of the mind the id, or the
‘it’. These desires are kept in check by a part of the mind that is geared to self-
protection and dealing with reality. This part of the mind Freud called ego. To
reveal these hidden parts of the mind that the ego represses, Freud invented the
technique of psychoanalysis. Because our mind is most relaxed when we are
sleeping and our ego is at its weakest, talking about the dreams of the patient
could make it possible to understand what was going on in his or her
unconscious. Finally, Freud recognized that we are not just governed by blind
desire and self-protection: we can act morally. The part of the mind that
generates moral judgements Freud called the superego. He argued that the child
is born into the world as a little bundle of simple and pressing desires for food
and comfort (id processes) and through processes of maturation and interaction
with parents and others develops an ego and superego.
Behaviourists believed strongly that psychology should restrict its focus to the
careful study of observable behaviours. Pavlov mapped two mechanisms,
classical conditioning, a form of associative learning whereby a neutral stimulus
is paired with a salient stimulus so that eventually the neutral stimulus predicts
the salient stimulus, and operant conditioning, a form of associative learning
whereby behaviour is modified depending on its consequences.
Francis Galton began the systematic study of individual differences in
intelligence an personality. Psychometricians focused on measuring individual
differences within such areas as intelligence and personality.
, Humanistic psychologists reacted against the mechanical portrayals of people by
the behaviourists and emphasized individuals’ potential for growth and self-
actualization.
Psychology in the 21 s t century: Cognitive Psychology, Neuroscience and
Evolution
Cognitive psychologists reignited interest in the study of mental processes,
comparing the workings of the mind to the workings of computers. They replaced
the behaviourist language of stimulus and response with the language of
information processing, such as input, output, hardware and software.
Roger Sperry performed experiments on people who had undergone surgery and
that split their brain into fully independent hemispheres because the corpus
callosum had been cut. He showed how functioning at the psychological level
was related to underlying brain organization
Sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson applied the principles of evolution to explain
complex social behaviour in terms of adaptation, leading to the development of
evolutionary psychology as an emerging field of study. One goal of evolutionary
psychologists is to identify cultural universality, human behaviours and practices
that occur across all cultures. They believe that uncovering universal human
behaviours will help identify inborn functions common to all humans.
The Diversity of Psychology and Psychological Literacy
The theoretical and cultural diversity of the field of psychology has increased
dramatically over the recent years. Because of this diversity, psychological
literacy, having the research skills and vocabulary allowing one to evaluate,
communicate and apply psychological principles, is important.
The major branches of professional psychology are: clinical, counselling,
educational, occupational, sports and exercise, forensic, teaching and research.
Across these professional areas psychologists are united by their shared values.
The generally agree that psychology is theory-driven, empirical, multilevel and
contextual.
In recent years a new areas of psychological research have emerged: important
new fields are cultural psychology, the study of how individual behaviour can be
shaped or affected by societal processes. In this field, people often focus on
differences between collectivist cultures and individualistic cultures. One study of
differences between these two types of cultures examined positive emotions,
such as happiness. Cognitive neuroscience focuses not only on mental processes
but also on how mental processes interact with the biological functions of the
brain; that is, what happens in the brain when we are remembering something,
making a decision or paying attention to something. One goal is to link specific
mental processes to particular brain activities. Social neuroscience seeks to link
social functioning to particular brain activities. Another new movement in
psychology is positive psychology. In this movement, we can see influences of
both functionalists, wo were interested in applying psychological research, and
the humanists, who were interested in helping people achieve their highest
potential. Positive psychology gives special attention to more upbeat features of
human functioning, including happiness, meaning in life and character strengths.
It also focuses on how those features of positive living might be developed more
readily.
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