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Summary Psychology, ISBN: 9781305114302 Introduction In Psychology
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Complete summary of Bernstein's book 'Psychology'.
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Inleiding in de Psychologie literatuursamenvatting PEDA
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Samenvatting Inleiding in de Psychologie, literatuur (foundations and frontiers psychology) + hoorcolleges (eigen cijfer 8)
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Samenvatting Inleiding in de Psychologie (6461PS002) 2021-2022
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Psychology Foundations and frontiersChapter 1 – Introducing psychology
Psychology is the science that studies behavior and mental processes (and seeks to apply that study in
the service of human welfare).
Positive psychology focusses on what goes right, the things that make life most worth living. It
focusses on positive experiences and characteristics.
Subfields of psychology
Biological psychologists study how the brain and the body’s biological processes affect, and are
affected by, behavior and mental processes.
Cognitive psychologists study mental abilities such as sensation and perception, memory and learning
and other aspects of human thought or cognition.
Engineering psychologists study human factors in the use of equipment and help designers create
better versions of that equipment.
Developmental psychologists seek to understand, describe and explore how behavior and mental
processes change over a lifetime.
Personality psychologists study the characteristics that make individuals similar or different from one
another.
Clinical and counseling psychologists seek to assess, understand and change abnormal behavior.
Community psychologists work to obtain psychological services for people in need of help and to
prevent psychological disorders by working for changes in social systems.
Health psychologists study the effects of behavior and mental processes on health and illness and vice
versa.
Educational psychologists study methods by which instructors and students learn and apply their
results to improving those methods.
School psychologists test IQ’s, diagnose students’ academic problems and set up programs to improve
students’ achievements.
Social psychologists study how people influence one another’s’ behavior and mental processes,
individually and in groups.
Industrial and organizational psychologists study ways to improve efficiency, productivity and
satisfaction among workers and the organizations that employ them.
Quantitative psychologists develop and use statistical tools to analyse research data.
Sport psychologists explore the relationship between athletic performance and such psychological
variables as motivation and emotion.
Forensic psychologists assist in jury selection, evaluate defendants’ mental competence to stand trial
and deal with other issues involving psychology and the law.
Environmental psychologists study the effects of the physical environment on behavior and mental
processes.
Other psychologists: neuro-, military-, consumer-, and rehabilitation psychologists.
All these subfields often overlap. There are many linkages within psychology and beyond.
Psychologists collaborate often with specialists in the field of neuroscience (study levels of the
nervous system).
,A brief history of psychology
The roots of psychology can especially be traced in the history of philosophy. The philosophical view
‘empirism’ was very important to the development of scientific psychology. For well over a century
now, empiricism had guided psychologists in seeing knowledge about behavior and mental process
through observations governed by the rules of science.
Wundt wanted to identify the basic elements of consciousness and describe how they are organized
and how they relate to one another. He developed ingenious laboratory methods to study the speed of
decision making and other mental events, and in an attempt to observe conscious experience, Wundt
used the technique of introspection (‘looking forward’).
In conducting this kind of research, Wundt began psychology’s transformations from the philosophy
of mental processes to the science of mental processes.
Edward Titchener used introspection in his own laboratory at Cornell University. He studied Wundt’s
basic elements of consciousness, as well as images and other aspects of conscious experience that are
harder to quantify. Titchener called his approach structuralism because he was trying to define the
structure of consciousness.
Wundt was not alone in the scientific study of mental processes, nor was his work universally
accepted.
Gestalt psychologists (1912) pointed out that the whole shape of conscious experience is not the same
as the sum of its parts.
Freud and Psychoanalysis: began to explore the unconsciousness. As a physician, Freud had
presumed that all behavior and mental processes have physical causes somewhere in the nervous
system. He began to question that assumption in the late 1800s, after encountering several patients
who displayed a variety of physical ailments that had no apparent physical cause. After interviewing
these patients using hypnosis and other methods, Freud concluded that the causes of these people’s
physical problems where not physical. The real causes, he said, were deep-seated problems that the
patients hat pushed out of consciousness. He eventually came to believe that all behavior is motivated
by psychological processes, especially by mental conflicts that occur without our awareness, at an
unconscious level psychoanalysis.
William James and Functionalism: William James founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard
University in the late 1870’s, though it was used mainly to conduct demonstrations for his students.
William James rejected both Wundt’s approach and Titchener’s structuralism. In accordance with
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, James wanted to understand how images, sensations, memories
and the other mental events that make up our flowing ‘’stream of consciousness’’ function to help us
adapt to our environment. This idea was consistent with an approach to psychology called
functionalism, which focused on the role of consciousness in guiding people’s ability to make
decisions, solve problems and the like.
John B. Watson and Behaviorism: Darwin’s theory of evolution led other psychologists to study
animals as well as humans. John B. Watson agreed that the observable behavior of animals and
humans is the most important source of scientific information for psychology. Watson’s view, called
behaviorism, recognized that consciousness exists, but it did not consider it worth studying because
consciousness would always be private and therefore not observable by scientific methods. (a theory
of learning based on the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning. Conditioning occurs
through interaction with the environment. Behaviorists believe that our responses to environmental
stimuli shape our actions.)
Psychologists today strive to study mental processes with precision and scientific objectivity. Most
psychologists blend aspects of two or more approaches in an effort to understand more fully the
behavior and mental processes in their subfield.
,Approaches to the science of psychology
The biological approach: in which behavior and behavior disorders are seen as the result of physical
processes, especially those relating to the brain and to hormones and other chemicals.
The evolutionary approach: emphasizes the inherited, adaptive aspects of behavior and mental
processes. (Affected by evolution and natural selection.)
The psychodynamic approach: emphasizes the interplay of unconscious mental processes in
determining human thought, feelings and behavior (Freud).
The behavioral approach: emphasizing that human behavior is determined mainly by what a person
had learned, especially from rewards and punishments.
The cognitive approach: emphasizes research on how the brain takes in information, creates
perceptions, forms and retrieves memories, processes information and generates integrated patterns of
action.
The humanistic approach: focuses on how each person has a unique capacity to choose how to think
and act.
Human diversity and psychology
Many aspects of behavior and mental processes are affected by Socialcultural factors (social identity
and other background factors, such as ethnicity, gender etc).
Nowadays, psychologists look more and more at how culture influences behavior and mental
processes.
, Chapter 8 – Intelligence
There are many important decisions being based on the results of intelligence tests, such as which
children need special education or which students will be admitted to college.
People who are good at using and understanding language and skilled at thinking, problem solving,
and decision making are likely to be seen as intelligent. But intelligence is not limited to these abilities
alone. We can’t use x-rays or brain scans to see intelligence, so we have to draw conclusions about
people’s intelligence from what can be observed and measured in their actions. This usually means
looking at scores on tests designed to measure intelligence.
Testing for intelligence
Intelligence: personal attributes that center around skill at information processing, problem solving,
and adapting to new or changing environments. Intelligence includes three main characteristics:
- Abstract thinking or reasoning abilities
- Problem-solving abilities
- The capacity to acquire knowledge.
Standard tests of intelligence don’t address all of these abilities.
Psychologists have different views on intelligence, its definition and how it should be measured.
A brief history of intelligence tests
The story of modern intelligence begins in France in 1904. Alfred Binet developed a set of test items
that provided the model for today’s intelligence tests. Binet assumed that reasoning, thinking and
problem solving all depend on intelligence, so he looked for tasks that would highlight differences in
children’s ability to do these things.
Binet also assumed that children’s abilities increase with age. Mental age: a score corresponding to the
age level of the most-advanced items a child could answer correctly on Alfred Binet’s first intelligence
test.
At the time Binet published his test, Lewis Terman began to develop an English-language version that
has come to be known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: a test for determining a person’s
intelligence quotient, IQ. mental age was divided bij chronological age, and the result, multiplied
by 100, was called the IQ.
Terman and others: intelligence is a fixed and inherited entity.
Binet: intelligence could be improved with education and training.
In the late 1930s, David Wechsler, developed new tests designed to improve on the earlier ones in
three important ways: verbal and nonverbal subtests, success depended less on having formal
schooling, each sutest was scored separately.
Intelligence tests today
Today’s revised editions of the Wechsler tests and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale are the most
widely used, individually administered intelligence tests. **
Calculating IQ
The points you score for each correct answer are added up, that total score is then compared with the
scores earned by other people. The average score obtained by people at each age level is assigned an
IQ value of 100. As a result of this scoring method, your intelligence quotient, reflects your relative
standing within a population of your age.
Evaluating intelligence tests
No intelligence test can accurately measure all aspects of what various people think of as intelligence.
A test is a systematic procedure for observing behavior in a standard situation and describing it with
the help of a numerical scale or a category system.
Tests are standardized, which helps ensure that test results will not be significantly affected by factors
such as who gives and scores the test. It is objective. Test scores can be used to calculate norms, which
are descriptions of the frequency of particular scores. The two most important things to know about
when determining the value of a test are its statistical reliability and validity.
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