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Detailed summary of the book 'Psychology' by Gray and Bjorklund
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A detailed summary of almost all chapters of the book. All definitions are given, and relevant figures are included.
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Test Bank For Psychology - Eighth Edition ©2018 All Chapters - 9781319060350
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Summary ‘Psychology’ by Gray andBjorklund
All chapters except for chapters 4, 9 and 12.
Gray, P. & Bjorklund, D.F. (2018), Psychology (8th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers. ISBN-
10: 1-319-15051-9. ISBN-13: 978-1-319-15051-8.
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,Chapter 1
Psychology: the science of behaviour and the mind.
Behaviour: the observable actions of a person or an animal.
Mind: an individual’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives,
emotions, and other subjective experiences. All of the unconscious knowledge and operating
rules that are built into or stored in the brain and that provide the foundation for organising
behaviour and conscious experience.
Science: all attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical
analysis of objectively observable data.
Dualism: Until the eighteenth century, philosophy was tightly bound to and constrained by
religion. The church maintained that each human being consists of two distinct but intimately
conjoined entities, a material body and an immaterial soul.
Materialism (Thomas Hobbes): a spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept and that nothing
exists but matter and energy. All human behaviour, including the voluntary choices we make,
can in theory be understood in terms of physical processes in the body, especially the brain.
Reflexology (I.M. Sechenov): every human action can in theory be understood as a reflex.
All human actions are initiated by stimuli in the environment. The 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. Reflexology is the physiological study of
the human body that suggests that all human behaviour occurs through reflexes, and that
even so -called voluntary actions are actually complex reflexes involving higher parts of the
brain.
Localisation of function: specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in the
production of mental experiences and behaviour.
• Johannes Müller (1838/1965): different qualities of sensory experience come about
because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain.
• Pierre Flourens (1824/1965): performed experiments with animals showing that
damage to different parts of the brain produces different kinds of deficits in animals’
abilities to move.
• Paul Broca (1861/1965): showed that people who suffer injury to a very specific area
of the brain’s left hemisphere lose the ability to speak but do not lose other mental
abilities.
Phrenology (Galt): the mind consists of mental faculties that are located at specific sites in
the brain. By feeling bumps on the skull, phrenologists claimed they could infer the size of
various areas and describe a persons’ psychological characteristics.
Empiricism: human knowledge and thought derive ultimately from sensory experience
(vision, hearing, touch, and so forth). If we are machines, we are machines that learn. Our
senses provide the input that allows us to acquire knowledge of the world around us, and
this knowledge allows us to think about that world and behave adaptively within it.
Association by contiguity: if a person experiences two environmental events (stimuli, or
sensations) at the same time or one right after the other (contiguously), those two events will
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,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. Events that occur at the same time or
close together will be bound together (associated) in the mind so that thinking of one event
will trigger the memory of the other event.
• Contiguity: closeness in space or time.
Nativism: opposite of empiricism. The most basic forms of human knowledge and the basic
operating characteristics of the mind, which provide the foundation for human nature, are
native to the human mind—that is, are inborn and do not have to be acquired from
experience.
A priori / a posteriori knowledge (Immanuel Kant):
• A priori knowledge built into the human brain and does not have to be learned.
Predictions formulated before the research is conducted.
• A posteriori knowledge: one gains from experience in the environment. Are given
after the results are known. Since nearly everything can be explained logically in
retrospect, this does not provide any new insights from the scientific point of view.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882): living things evolve gradually, over generations, by a process
of natural selection. Those individuals whose inherited characteristics are well adapted to
their local environment are more likely to survive and reproduce than are other, less well-
adapted individuals. At each generation, random changes in the hereditary material produce
variations in offspring, and those variations that improve the chance of survival and
reproduction are passed from generation to generation in increasing numbers.
Level of analysis: the level, or type, of causal process that is studied. A person’s behaviour
or mental experience can be examined at these levels:
• Biological cluster:
o Neural (brain as cause)
o Physiological (internal chemical functions, such as hormones, as cause)
o Genetic (genes as cause)
o Evolutionary (natural selection as cause)
• Effects of experiences and knowledge:
o Learning (the individual’s prior experiences with the environment as cause)
o Cognitive (the individual’s knowledge or beliefs as cause)
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, o Social (the influence of other people as cause)
o Cultural (the culture in which the person develops as cause)
o Developmental (age-related changes as cause).
Neural
Behavioural neuroscience: understanding how the nervous system produces the specific
type of experience or behaviour being studied.
Activation of the left frontal cortex → associated with approach-motivation, typically
associated with pleasurable activities.
Activation in the right frontal cortex → associated with withdrawal-motivation, typically
corresponding to avoidance of negative stimuli.
Physiological
Biopsychology: study the ways hormones and drugs act on the brain to alter behaviour and
experience, either in humans or in nonhuman animals.
• Example: oestrogen and sexual jealousy, aggression in animals in breeding season
(testosterone)
Genetic
Genes: the units of heredity that provide the codes for building the entire body, including the
brain.
Behavioural genetics: explain psychological differences among individuals in terms of
differences in their genes.
Evolutionary
Evolutionary psychology: explain how or why behaviour and mental experiences came
about in the course of evolution.
Research supports the view that jealousy functions to promote long-term mating bonds. All
animals that form long-term bonds exhibit jealous-like behaviors; they behave in ways that
seem designed to drive off, or in other ways discourage, any individuals that would lure away
their mates.
Learning
Learning psychology: also called behavioural psychology. Interested in the ways that
learning can influence the types of behaviour that they study.
Jealous reactions that prove to be effective in obtaining rewards—such as those that
succeed in repelling competitors or attracting renewed affection from the mate—may
increase in frequency with experience, and ineffective reactions may decrease. People and
animals may also learn, through experience, what sorts of cues are potential signs of infi
delity in their mates, and those cues may come to trigger jealous reactions.
Cognitive
Cognition: information in the mind that is somehow stored and activated by the workings of
the brain.
• Conscious information: the person is aware of it and can describe it.
• Unconscious information: can still infl uence one’s conscious experiences and
behavior.
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