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Summary Psychology - Bjorklund and Gray, chapter 1, 5 and 8
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Chapter 1, 5 and 8 NB: chapter 5 is without brain mechanisms of emotions, brain mechanisms controlling sleep and drives as states of the brain
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TEST BANK -- SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY, 8TH EDITION BY PETER O. GRAY (AUTHOR), DAVID BJORKLUND (AUTHOR)PART 1 (PB0014) -- SAMENVATTING INLEIDING TOT DE PSYCHOLOGIE, 8E EDITIE DOOR PETER O. GR...
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Introduction to Psychology (Ch.1-16)
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Samenvatting Psychology - Introductory Psychology and Brain & Cognition (7201702PXY)
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Chapter 1Fundamental ideas for psychology: a historical overview
Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied
scientifically. Questions about behavior and mind can be answered scientifically,
according to the Greeks. The people in the Middle Ages didn’t take this approach and
it began to sprout again in the renaissance and enlightenment.
Until 18th century -> philosophy was bound to religion.
Humans according to the church: a material body and an immaterial soul (cannot be
studied scientifically) = dualism
Descartes
Challenged the view that the soul was responsible for the body’s heat, ability to move
and for life itself.
Body = intricate, complex machine that generates its own heat without influence of
the soul.
Mechanical control of movement = modern understanding of reflexes. He believed
that very complex behaviors can occur through purely mechanical means, without the
involvement of the soul.
Nonhuman animals don’t have souls: activities performed by humans that is
qualitatively no different from the behavior of a nonhuman animal can occur without a
soul -> purely mechanical. The only difference is that humans have thought: thought
must be responsive to the sensory input channeled into the body through sense
organs -> directs bodies movement.
Interaction soul and the physical machine = the soul acts on the body at a particular
physical location -> a small organ between the two hemispheres of the brain (pineal
body)
Threadlike structures (nerves and neurons) = bring sensory information by physical
means into the brain, where the soul receives the information and thinks about it. On
the basis of those thoughts, the soul then wills movement to occur end executes its
will by triggering physical actions in nerves that act on muscles.
Reflexes = involuntary responses to stimuli.
Thought = conscious deliberation and judgment.
His ideas are still popular: acknowledges the roles of sense organs, nerves, and
muscles in behavior without violating religion
Limitations:
- As a philosophy, it stumbles on the question of how nonmaterial entity (soul) can
have a material effect (movement body) and how the body can follow natural law
and yet be moved by a soul that does not.
- As a foundation for psychology, the theory sets limits on what can and cannot be
understood scientifically -> thought is out of bound for scientific analysis.
Hobbes
Leviathan = the soul is a meaningless concept and nothing exists but matter and
energy: materialism
,All human behavior can be understood in terms of physical processes in the body and
the brain.
Conscious thought = a product of the brain’s machinery and therefore subject to
natural law. -> Inspired a school of thought about the mind known as empiricism
Limitations:
- No limitations
19th century psychology: learning about the machine
Increased understanding of reflexes: nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and
peripheral nerves that connect the central nervous system to sense organs and
muscles.
Magendie
Nerves entering the spinal cord contain to pathways:
- Carrying messages into the central nervous system from the skin’s sensory
receptors.
- Carrying messages out to operate muscles.
Sechenov
All human behavior occurs through reflexes, even voluntary actions = reflexology.
-> all human actions are initiated by stimuli in the environment.
Stimuli-> act on a person’s sensory receptors -> setting in motion a chain of events in
the nervous system that culminates in the muscle movements that constitute the
action.
The concept of localization of function in the brain
Specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in the production of mental
experience and behavior.
Muller
The different qualities of sensory experience come about, because the nerves form
different sense organs excite different parts of the brain.
Flourens
Damage to different parts of the brain produces different kinds of deficits in animal’s
abilities to move.
Broca
Published evidence that people who suffer injury to a specific area of the brain’s left
hemisphere lose the ability to speak but don’t lose other mental abilities.
1. The way people behave, think and feel is modified over time by their
experiences in their environment
Locke, Hartley, Mill and Stuart Mill
British empiricism = the idea that human knowledge and thought derive ultimately
from sensory experience -> we are machines that learn.
Senses provide the input that allows us the acquire knowledge of the world around us
-> allows us to think about that world and behave adaptively within it.
Locke
, Tabula rasa= child’s mind -> no dispositions or preferences to influence how they will
learn and develop -> no human nature other than an ability to adapt one’s behavior to
the demands of the environment.
Thoughts = not products of free will, but rather reflections of a person’s experiences in
the physical and social environment. All content of the mind derive from the
environment
Fundamental units of the mind = elementary ideas that come directly from sensory
experiences and are linked together to form complex ideas and thoughts.
Law of association by contiguity= if a person experiences two environmental events
(stimuli) at the same time or right after the other (contiguously), those events will
become associated (bound together) in the person’s mind, such that the thought of
one event will, in the future, tend to elicit the thought of the other. -> fundamental
principle of learning and memory
Stuart Mill
Mental chemistry = complex ideas and thoughts are formed from combinations of
elementary ideas, much as chemical compounds are formed form combinations of
chemical elements.
The nativist response to empiricism (Germany) - Leibniz and Kant
Nativism = the most basic forms of human knowledge and the basic operating
characteristics of the mind, which provide the foundation of human nature, are native
to the human mind -> are inborn and don’t have to be acquired from experience .
To learn anything, any entity must contain some initial machinery already built in .
The mind must come with some initial furnishings in order for it to be furnished further
through experience.
Kant
Critique of pure reason = Kant distinguished between a priori (built into the human
brain) knowledge and a posteriori knowledge (experience) -> without the first, a
person can’t acquire the second.
Limitation:
- He had no scientific explanation of how those furnishing could have been built
- Or why they function as they do
2. The body’s machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences
is a product of evolution by natural selection
Darwin
The origin of species = living things evolve gradually by a process of natural
selection.
-> changes are made in a way that it allows animals to meet the changing demands of
their environment .
-> living things have acquired tendencies to behave in ways that promote their
survival and reproduction -> functions of behavior = the ways in which an organism’s
behavior helps it to survive and reproduce .
Applying Darwin’s ideas to psychology
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