Class notes
PSy1004F Introduction to Psychology 1 Lecture Notes
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- University Of Cape Town (UCT)
All lecture notes from the 2020 UCT PSY1004F course
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Lecture 1: Introducing Psychology:• Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and the mind.
• Behavior = directly observable actions and responses.
• The mind = your internal states and processes (thoughts, feelings inferred from observable
responses).
• The goals of psychology are to Describe (what is happening, where and to whom), Explain (why is it
happening), Predict (when will it happen again) and Control (how can it be changed).
• In psychology there are two main research styles: basic research and applied research. Basic
research is knowledge-driven, e.g.: a memory test that can be taken. Applied research is problem
focused research, e.g.: a new study method because your current one isn’t working for you.
Types of psychologists:
1. Clinical psychologist
2. Councelling psychologist
3. Research psychologist
4. Industrial psychologist
5. Educational psychologist
6. Neuro psychologist
• Psychology is a balancing act between philosophy, physiology and physical science.
•
Early Schools of psychology:
• Structuralism: analyzing consciousness in terms of its basic elements. It is the way we respond
emotionally to certain stimuli.
• Objective introspection: examining and measuring one’s own thoughts.
• Functionalism: functions of consciousness are more important than its structure. The focus was on
how the mind allows people to function in the world. It influenced educational, industrial and
evolutionary psychology.
• Gestalt psychology: consciousness cannot be broken down into its basic elements. “The whole is
greater than the sum of its parts.” People seek out “wholes” and Gestalt = an organized whole.
Lecture 2: Three Influential Schools:
1. Psychoanalysis: (Sigmund Freud) the unconscious mind, the importance of sex and sexual
motivations, the importance of early childhood experiences, the Oedepus complex and Electra
complex.
2. Behaviorism: classical conditioning – focusses on observable behavior, not consciousness. Behavior
is not unconsciously determined, it is learned. ‘Little Albert’ experiment and Pavlov’s Dog
experiment.
, 3. Psychodynamic theory: examines the unconscious and the early experiences of one’s life. Less
emphasis on sex/ sexual motivation, and more emphasis on the development of a sense of self/
interpersonal relationships.
Anosognosia: a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person with a disability is unaware of
having it (Wikipedia)
Modern Perspectives:
1. Behaviourism: operant conditioning (how voluntary behaviour is learned) and systematic
desensitization (Joseph Wolpe, ‘Lucas’ the spider on YouTube that helps people with
arachnophobia).
2. Humanism: (Maslow and his hierarchy of needs) the ‘third force’ in psychology, an emphasis on
free will and personal growth, and self-actualisation. Person-centred therapy, positive psychology
3. Cognitivism: studying thought processes (memory, intelligence, perception, language, learning etc).
Leads to cognitive neuroscience (studying how the brain works when engaged in cognitive tasks).
Very closely linked to biopsychology.
4. The sociocultural turn: society/ culture and group membership influence behaviour, thoughts and
feelings. Leads to studied in social psychology and cultural psychology.
5. Biopsychology: brain and other bodily processes that regulate behaviour (hormones, genes, brain
chemicals, tumours, disease).
6. Evolutionary psychology: searching for the biological bases for universal mental characteristics
(lying, fear of snakes, music and dancing). The mind is an information processing machine designed
by natural selection, e.g. gendered responses to emotional and sexual infidelity.
Levels of analysis in psychology:
Biological, psychological, environmental
Lecture 3: A brief history of psychology in South Africa:
• Cutodialism – late 19th/ early 20th century
• Interventionalism – 1920s – appointment of psychologists, standardisation of intelligence tests.
Overarching spirit of scientific racism (hierarchy of ‘races,’ justification of segregation etc)
• Psychology was used for the ‘poor white’ problem:
- E.G. Malherbe calls for an interdisciplinary investigation (1921)
- Carnegie Corporation sets aside funds (1927)
- ‘Poor White’ study is launched (1928)
- Psychological report
• Recommendations included job reservation and segregation in the workplace. Psychology proved
its usefulness and served racial capitalism.
• Psychology was also used to contribute to the South African Air Force and WW2 screening and
selection.
, • In industry, the national institute for personnel research used psychology to ensure the efficiency of
black labour.
Psychological associations:
• 1948: South African Psychological Association
• 1962: Psychological Institute of the republic of south Africa
• 1983: Psychological Association of South Africa
• 1983: Organisation for Appropriate Social Services in South Africa
• 1980’s: Psychology and Apartheid Committee
• There is a deep need for psychological services in SA due to a host of psychosociological problems
including poverty, violence, HIV etc. 70 – 80% of psychologists only speak English or Afrikaans. 25%
of psychologists are black and the curriculum is dependent on European/ American textbooks.
Research is also mostly indifferent towards social issues.
Week 2, Chapter 2: Biopsychological Processes:
• Neuropsychology: the study of the function of the brain by looking at effects of brain damage on
body functions.
• It is a science concerned with the integration of psychological observations on behaviour and the
mind with neurological….
• Neuropsychologists diagnose neurological disease (organic or non-organic disease), differentiate
normal ageing, work in hospital and rehab settings, research, or work in private practice and
medico-legal settings.
• Examples of organic disease (actual brain change is undergone that affects patients behaviour) =
Parkinson’s disease, dementia of the Alzheimer type.
• Examples of non-organic disease = pseudodementia such as depression or bereavement or drugs
that have in impact on the brain that cause the onset of certain disordered function; or psychogenic
on-epileptic seizures such as conversion disorder or malingering.
• Normal aging vs dementia – there are different types of dementia. (Alzheimer, vascular, dementia
with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal).
• Causes of brain injury range from vascular, tumour, degenerative disease, infectious disease,
trauma or epilepsy.
• Diagnosis of neurological disease: a neuropsychologist is able to infer behavioural changes from
brain injury, or determine brain injury from behavioural changes.
• Phineas Gage was a railway worker in the US who made a mistake when planting dynamite charge
and blew a steel rod through his own head. He showed quick recovery and no discernible cognitive
damage but ‘Gage was no longer gage’ in that he had had a complete personality change, i.e: he
went from a reliable worker to an unreliable drunk and from respectful to rude and obnoxious.
Lectures 3,4 & 5:
• Refer to Chapter 2 in the textbook and notes made in workbook as well as lecture slides on Vula.
, Week 3, Lecture 6 – Memory:
• There are four main properties of the mind. It is subjective, where only behaviour can be studied
empirically. Secondly, it is capable of consciousness – where the fundamental component is feeling.
Thirdly, it is also objective (even though we cannot see it or its processes, we can see the effects
thereof) therefore allowing psychologists to bring subjectivity into science.
Lecture 9:
• We never recall anything exactly as it happened (cookie analogy of how memory starts as a whole
and then breaks up into separate crumbs of information, making it relatively difficult to reassemble
exactly the same as it once was).
• We usually recall memories through a positive filter when we reflect on them. This is termed “rosy
retrospection.” Retrieving information from long term memory is a constructive process.
• If we didn’t have the rosy retrospective tendency, our lives would not be as positive. People who
tend to remember everything (in an abnormally accurate way) have miserable lives due to not
having a filter at all.
• Memory schemas are generalised ideas about how events happen. It is used to organise
information and reconstruct information during recall.
Three types of memory distortion:
• The misinformation effect is the distortion of a memory by exposure to misleading post-event
information. Language used describing a car accident for example, can really change our recall of
the accident. For example, the words “smashed into another car” could make the accident be
recalled as much more hectic as opposed to “bumped into another car.”
• Source confusion is the tendency to recall something or recognise it as familiar, but to forget where
one encountered it.
• Suggestive questioning distorts memory by triggering different retrieval cues. Language is key to
what people tend to agree with. Children tend to be most vulnerable when it comes to suggestive
questioning.
Children as eyewitnesses:
• The most accurate information from children is usually gained through free recall. The child is asked
to describe an event in their own words. Open ended prompts are also more effective than closed
questions, for example, forced yes or no questions lead to lower levels of accuracy than “who,
what, when, where” questions.
• Children are extremely susceptible to suggestive or misleading information which could distort the
story.
Week 5, Chapter 5: Learning
Lecture 1: What is learning?
• Learning allows us to adapt to our environment. It results in a physical change in the brain brought
about by an experience or practice. It is any relatively permanent change in behaviour.
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