CH1 Psychology (The science of behavior and mind)
- Behavior: Observable actions of a person or animal
- Mind: An individual’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives,
emotions and other subjective experiences.
OR All of the unconscious knowledge and operating rules built into or stored in the
brain and provide the foundation for organizing behavior and conscious experience.
Science: All attempts to answer questions through the systematic collection and logical
analysis of objectively observable data.
By using the data of behavior, it is possible to make inferences about the mind.
Typical behavior and thought: How most people think and behave most of the time and the
factors that influence such actions
Focus question 1: How will you use the focus questions in the text’s margins as a guide to
reading this book?
To study this book, read and think about each focus questions as you come to it before
reading. This will help you focus as you read and will also help you understand and
remember what you have read.
Reading with the active intention of answering the focus questions is a more effective
learning strategy than just passively trying to “learn” or “absorb” the material.
Three fundamental ideas of Psychology
The founding of psychology as a scientific discipline in 1879 by Wilhem Wundt in Germany.
Before the roots of psychology were developed by philosophers, physicists, physiologists,
and naturalists.
1. Behavior and mental experiences have physical cause that can be studied scientifically.
2. The way people behave, think and feel is modified over time by their experiences in their
environment.
3. The body’s machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences, is a product of
evolution by natural selection.
The Idea of Physical Causation of Behavior
The Renaissance (15th century) and The Enlightenment (18th century)
Dualism: a material body and an immaterial soul
- The body is part of natural world, thus could be studied scientifically. The soul,
however, is a supernatural entity that operates according to its own free will, not
natural law and therefore cannot be studied scientifically. This view was dominated
by the church and could not be challenged around that time.
René Descartes (1596-1650)’ Version of Dualism: Focus on the Body
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,Focus question 2: What was Descartes’ version of dualism? How did it help pave the way for
a science of psychology?
Descartes regarded the body as an intricate, complex machine that generates its own
heat and is capable of moving even without the influence of the soul. His conception of
mechanical control of movement resembles our modern understanding of reflexes, which are
involuntary responses to stimuli.
The one essential ability that humans have but nonhuman animals do not is thought
(conscious deliberation and judgement). To be useful, thought must be responsive to the
sensory input channeled into the body through the sense organs, and it must be capable of
directing the body’s movements by acting on the muscles.
Descartes believed that the soul was housed in the pineal gland. Threadlike structures
(nerves or neurons) brings sensory information by physical means into the brain, where the
soul receives the information and, by non-psychical means, thinks about it. The soul then
wills movements to occur and executes its will by triggering psychical actions in nerves that
act on muscles. With the heavy emphasis on the body, Descartes dualism certainly helped
pave the way for a science of psychology.
Focus question 3: What reasons can you think of for why Descartes’ theory, despite its
intuitive appeal, was unsuitable for a complete psychology?
Limitations as a philosophy and as a foundation of psychology
Philosophy: how a nonmaterial entity (the soul) can have a material effect (movement of the
body), or how the body can follow natural law and yet be moved by a soul that does not1
Foundations of psychology: The whole realm of thought, and all behaviors that are guided by
thought are out of bounds for scientific analysis if they are the products of a willful soul. So,
it is unsuitable for a complete psychology.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and the Philosophy of Materialism
Focus question 4: How did Hobbes’s materialism help lay the groundwork for a science of
psychology?
Materialism: A philosophy in which Hobbes argued that spirit or soul is a meaningless
concept and that nothing exists but matter and energy.
All human behavior can be understood in terms of physical processes in the body,
especially the brain. Conscious thought is purely a product of the brain’s machinery and
therefore subject to natural law.
This philosophy places no theoretical limit and Hobbes’s ideas helped inspire a school of
thought about the mind known as empiricism.
Nineteenth-century Physiology: Learning about the Machine
The idea that the body including the brain is a machine The science of physiology
discoveries about the nervous system the origins of scientific psychology.
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Campbell, 1970
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,Increased Understanding of the Reflexes
The basic arrangement of the nervous system
- Central nervous system (brain and spinal cord)
- Peripheral nerves (connects the central nervous system to sense organs and muscles)
François Magendie (1822) two separate pathways in spinal cord:
1. Carrying messages into the central nervous system from the skin’s sensory receptors
2. Carrying messages out to operate muscles
Focus question 5: How did the nineteenth-century understanding of the nervous system
inspire a theory of behavior called reflexology?
Physiologists suggested that all human behavior occurs through reflexes. Through
experiments they began to learn about the neural connections that underlie simple reflexes
and found out that certain brain areas, when active, enhance or inhibit such reflexes.
Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov’s Reflexology: All human actions can be understood as
a reflex. He claimed that 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.
- Inspiration for Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)’s work on reflexes (see chapter 8)
The concept of Localization of Function in the Brain
Focus question 6: How did discoveries of localization of function in the brain help establish
the idea that the mind can be studied scientifically?
Localization of Function in the Brain: the idea that specific parts of the brain serve specific
functions in the production of mental experience and behavior.
Germany - Johannes Muller (1838-1965): The different qualities of sensory experience come
about because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain.
France - Pierre Flourens (1824-1965): Through animal experiments showed that damage to
different parts of the brain produces different kinds of deficits in one’s abilities to move.
Paul Broca (1861-1965): 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.
Such evidences about the relationships between the mind and brain helped lay
groundwork for scientific psychology, because it gave substance to the idea of a material
basis for mental processes.
German physician Franz Joseph Gall phrenology: all aspects of thought, emotion and
personality can be located in the brain. He believed that the mind consists of mental faculties
that are located at specific sites of the brain.
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, The Idea that the Mind and Behavior are shaped by Experience
British Empiricism in seventeenth-century carried on by philosophers as John Locke (1632-
1704), David Hartley (1705-1759), James Mill (1773-1836), and John Stuart Mill (1806-
1873).
Empiricism: The idea that human knowledge and thought derive ultimately from sensory
experiences.
John Locke’s idea of a child’s mind: tabula rosa, a blank state an believed that it is
experience that serves as the chalk that writes on and fills the slate. Children are born with no
dispositions or preferences to influence how they learn and develop.
There is no “human nature” other than an ability to adapt one’s behavior to the demands of
the environment.
The Empiricist Concept of Association by Contiguity
Focus question 7: How would you explain the origin of complex ideas and thoughts
according to British empiricism? What role did the law of association by contiguity play in
this philosophy?
According to British empiricism, thoughts are not products of free will but rather reflections
of a person’s experiences in the physical and social environment.
- The fundamental units of the mind are elementary ideas that come directly from
sensory experiences and are linked together to form complex ideas and thoughts.
The law of association by contiguity
- Contiguity: the closeness in space or time
If the person experiences two environmental events (stimuli or sensations) at the same time or
one right after the other (contiguously), those two 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.
John Stuart Mill’s Mental Chemistry: The most common complex philosophical ponderings
could, in theory, be understood as amalgams of elementary ideas that become linked together
in the mind as a result of contiguities in their experiences.
Focus question 8: How would you describe the influence that empiricist philosophy had on
psychology?
The law of association by contiguity, which is part of the empiricist philosophy, is still
regarded as a fundamental principle of learning and memory. In psychology the effects of
people’s environmental experiences on their thoughts, feelings, and behavior have long been
studied. Thus, the impact of empiricist philosophy on psychology is enormous.
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