The First Experiments in Cognitive Psychology Were Based on the Idea That Mental Responses Can Be

Chapter 1. Introducing Psychology

ane.two The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions

Learning Objectives

1. Explain how psychology changed from a philosophical to a scientific field of study.
2. List some of the well-nigh of import questions that concern psychologists.
3. Outline the bones schools of psychology and how each schoolhouse has contributed to psychology.

In this department we will review the history of psychology with a focus on the important questions that psychologists ask and the major approaches (or schools) of psychological inquiry. The schools of psychology that nosotros will review are summarized in Table i.3, "The Most Of import Approaches (Schools) of Psychology," while Tabular array 1.4, "History of Psychology," presents a timeline of some of the most important psychologists, beginning with the early Greek philosophers and extending to the present 24-hour interval. Tabular array ane.iii and Table 1.4 both correspond a choice of the well-nigh important schools and people; to mention all the approaches and all the psychologists who have contributed to the field is not possible in one affiliate. The approaches that psychologists have used to appraise the problems that interest them have inverse dramatically over the history of psychology. Peradventure nigh importantly, the field has moved steadily from speculation virtually behaviour toward a more objective and scientific approach as the technology available to written report homo behaviour has improved (Benjamin & Baker, 2004). There has besides been an influx of women into the field. Although most early on psychologists were men, now most psychologists, including the presidents of the nearly of import psychological organizations, are women.

Table 1.3 The Most Important Approaches (Schools) of Psychology.

[Skip Tabular array]
School of Psychology	Description	Important Contributors
Structuralism	Uses the method of introspection to place the basic elements or "structures" of psychological feel	Wilhelm Wundt, Edward B. Titchener
Functionalism	Attempts to understand why animals and humans take developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess	William James
Psychodynamic	Focuses on the function of our unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories and our early childhood experiences in determining behaviour	Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Erik Erickson
Behaviourism	Based on the premise that it is not possible to considerately report the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attending to the study of behaviour itself	John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner
Cognitive	The study of mental processes, including perception, thinking, retentiveness, and judgments	Hermann Ebbinghaus, Sir Frederic Bartlett, Jean Piaget
Social-cultural	The written report of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour	Fritz Heider, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter

Although near of the earliest psychologists were men, women are increasingly contributing to psychology. Hither are some examples:

• 1968: Mary Jean Wright became the first woman president of the Canadian Psychological Association.
• 1970: Virginia Douglas became the second woman president of the Canadian Psychological Association.
• 1972: The Hole-and-corner Symposium was held at the Canadian Psychological Association Convention. Afterwards having their private papers and so a symposium rejected past the Programme Committee, a group of six graduate students and not-tenured faculty, including Sandra Pyke and Esther Greenglass, held an contained research symposium that showcased piece of work existence done in the field of the psychology of women.
• 1976: The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women was founded.
• 1987: Janet Stoppard led the Women and Mental Health Commission of the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Although it cannot capture every important psychologist, the following timeline shows some of the almost important contributors to the history of psychology. (Adapted by J. Walinga.)

Table i.4 History of Psychology.

[Skip Table]
Date	Psychologist(s)	Clarification
428 to 347 BCE	Plato	Greek philosopher who argued for the part of nature in psychological development.
384 to 432 BCE	Aristotle	Greek philosopher who argued for the role of nurture in psychological development.
1588 to 1679 CE	Thomas Hobbes	English philosopher.
1596 to 1650	René Descartes	French philosopher.
1632 to 1704	John Locke	English philosopher.
1712 to 1778	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	French philosopher.
1801 to 1887	Gustav Fechner	German language experimental psychologist who developed the thought of the "just noticeable difference" (JND), which is considered to be the first empirical psychological measurement.
1809 to 1882	Charles Darwin	British naturalist whose theory of natural selection influenced the functionalist school and the field of evolutionary psychology.
1832 to 1920	Wilhelm Wundt	German psychologist who opened one of the first psychology laboratories and helped develop the field of structuralism.
1842 to 1910	William James	American psychologist who opened 1 of the start psychology laboratories and helped develop the field of functionalism.
1849 to 1936	Ivan Pavlov	Russian psychologist whose experiments on learning led to the principles of classical conditioning.
1850 to 1909	Hermann Ebbinghaus	High german psychologist who studied the ability of people to remember lists of nonsense syllables under different weather.
1856 to 1939	Sigmund Freud	Austrian psychologist who founded the field of psychodynamic psychology.
1867 to 1927	Edward Bradford Titchener	American psychologist  who contributed to the field of structuralism.
1878 to 1958	John B. Watson	American psychologist  who contributed to the field of behavioralism.
1886 to 1969	Sir Frederic Bartlett	British psychologist who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering.
1896 to 1980	Jean Piaget	Swiss psychologist  who developed an important theory of  cerebral development in children.
1904 to  1990	B. F. Skinner	American psychologist who contributed to the schoolhouse of behaviourism.
1926 to 1993	Donald Broadbent	British cerebral psychologist who was  pioneer in the study of attention.
20th and 21st centuries	Linda Bartoshuk; Daniel Kahneman; Elizabeth Loftus; Geroge Miller.	American psychologists who contributed to the cognitive school of psychology by studying learning, retentivity, and judgment. An important contribution is the advancement of the field of neuroscience. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on psychological decision making.
1850	Dorothea Dix	Canadian psychologist known for her contributions to mental health and opened one of the first mental hospitals in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
1880	William Lyall; James Baldwin	Canadian psychologists who wrote early psychology texts and created get-go Canadian psychology lab at the Academy of Toronto.
1950	James Olds; Brenda Milner; Wilder Penfield; Donald Hebb; Endel Telving	Canadian psychologists who contributed to neurological psychology and opened the Montreal Neurological Found.
1960	Albert Bandura	Canadian psychologist who adult 'social learning theory' with his Bobo doll studies illustrating the impact that observation and interaction has on learning.
1970	Hans Selye	Canadian psychologist who contributed significantly in the surface area of psychology of stress.

Although psychology has inverse dramatically over its history, the most of import questions that psychologists address have remained abiding. Some of these questions follow, and we volition discuss them both in this chapter and in the chapters to come:

• Nature versus nurture. Are genes or environment well-nigh influential in determining the behaviour of individuals and in accounting for differences amid people? Virtually scientists now agree that both genes and surround play crucial roles in almost human behaviours, and yet nosotros still take much to learn most how nature (our biological makeup) and nurture (the experiences that nosotros have during our lives) work together (Harris, 1998; Pinker, 2002).The proportion of the observed differences of characteristics among people (e.one thousand., in terms of their elevation, intelligence, or optimism) that is due to genetics is known every bit the heritability of the characteristic, and we will brand much utilise of this term in the chapters to come. We will see, for example, that the heritability of intelligence is very high (about .85 out of i.0) and that the heritability of extraversion is near .50. But we will besides see that nature and nurture interact in complex ways, making the question "Is it nature or is information technology nurture?" very difficult to respond.
• Complimentary will versus determinism. This question concerns the extent to which people take control over their ain actions. Are we the products of our surround, guided by forces out of our control, or are we able to choose the behaviours we appoint in? Virtually of united states like to believe in free will, that nosotros are able to do what we want—for instance, that we could become upwardly right now and go fishing. And our legal arrangement is premised on the concept of complimentary volition; nosotros punish criminals because we believe that they have choice over their behaviours and freely choose to disobey the law. Only as we will discuss after in the research focus in this department, contempo enquiry has suggested that we may take less control over our own behaviour than nosotros call up we do (Wegner, 2002).
• Accuracy versus inaccuracy. To what extent are humans good information processors? Although it appears that people are good enough to make sense of the globe around them and to make decent decisions (Fiske, 2003), they are far from perfect. Man judgment is sometimes compromised past inaccuracies in our thinking styles and by our motivations and emotions. For instance, our judgment may be affected by our desires to proceeds fabric wealth and to see ourselves positively and by emotional responses to the events that happen to us. Many studies have explored determination making in crisis situations such as natural disasters, or man error or criminal activity, such as in the cases of the Tylenol poisoning, the Maple Leaf meats listeriosis outbreak, the SARS epidemic or the Lac-Mégantic railroad train derailment (Effigy 1.2).

Figure 1.two Lac-Mégantic Derailment. Psychologists study the causes of poor judgments such as those fabricated by executives like the three criminally charged in relation to the Lac-Mégantic train derailment in 2013. This picture was taken from a Sûreté du Québec helicopter on the twenty-four hours of the derailment.

• Conscious versus unconscious processing. To what extent are nosotros conscious of our own actions and the causes of them, and to what extent are our behaviours caused by influences that nosotros are non enlightened of? Many of the major theories of psychology, ranging from the Freudian psychodynamic theories to contemporary work in cognitive psychology, fence that much of our behaviour is determined by variables that nosotros are not enlightened of.
• Differences versus similarities. To what extent are nosotros all similar, and to what extent are we different? For instance, are there basic psychological and personality differences between men and women, or are men and women mostly similar? And what virtually people from different ethnicities and cultures? Are people around the globe mostly the same, or are they influenced by their backgrounds and environments in unlike means? Personality, social, and cross-cultural psychologists attempt to answer these classic questions.

Early on Psychologists

The primeval psychologists that nosotros know well-nigh are the Greek philosophers Plato (428-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC). These philosophers (run into Figure 1.3) asked many of the same questions that today's psychologists ask; for instance, they questioned the stardom betwixt nature and nurture and the being of free volition. In terms of the former, Plato argued on the nature side, believing that certain kinds of cognition are innate or inborn, whereas Aristotle was more on the nurture side, assertive that each child is built-in as an "empty slate" (in Latin, a tabula rasa) and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience.

Effigy one.3 Early Psychologists. The earliest psychologists were the Greek Philosophers Plato (left) and Aristotle (right). Plato believed that much noesis was innate, whereas Aristotle thought that each child was built-in as an "empty slate" and that knowledge was primarily acquired through learning and experience.

European philosophers continued to ask these fundamental questions during the Renaissance. For instance, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) likewise considered the issue of free volition, arguing in its favour and believing that the mind controls the trunk through the pineal gland in the brain (an idea that made some sense at the time but was later proved incorrect). Descartes also believed in the existence of innate natural abilities. A scientist too as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and was among the beginning to understand that the nerves controlled the muscles. He also addressed the relationship between listen (the mental aspects of life) and torso (the physical aspects of life). Descartes believed in the principle of dualism: that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body. Other European philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), also weighed in on these issues. The fundamental trouble that these philosophers faced was that they had few methods for settling their claims. Near philosophers didn't conduct any research on these questions, in function because they didn't nonetheless know how to practise it, and in office because they weren't certain it was even possible to objectively study homo feel. But dramatic changes came during the 1800s with the assistance of the get-go two inquiry psychologists: the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who adult a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and the American psychologist William James (1842-1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard Academy.

Structuralism: Introspection and the Awareness of Subjective Experience

Wundt's research in his laboratory in Leipzig focused on the nature of consciousness itself. Wundt and his students believed that information technology was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind and to classify our conscious experiences scientifically. Wundt began the field known as structuralism, a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or structures of psychological feel. Its goal was to create a periodic tabular array of the elements of sensations, similar to the periodic table of elements that had recently been created in chemistry. Structuralists used the method of introspection to effort to create a map of the elements of consciousness. Introspectioninvolves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks, such as viewing colours, reading a page in a book, or performing a math problem. A participant who is reading a volume might report, for instance, that he saw some black and coloured straight and curved marks on a white background. In other studies the structuralists used newly invented reaction fourth dimension instruments to systematically assess non only what the participants were thinking but how long it took them to do so. Wundt discovered that it took people longer to report what audio they had but heard than to merely respond that they had heard the audio. These studies marked the first time researchers realized that in that location is a difference between the sensation of a stimulus and the perception of that stimulus, and the idea of using reaction times to study mental events has now go a mainstay of cerebral psychology.

Figure 1.4 Wundt and Titchener. Wilhelm Wundt (seated at left) and Edward Titchener (right) helped create the structuralist school of psychology. Their goal was to classify the elements of sensation through introspection.

Possibly the best known of the structuralists was Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927). Titchener was a student of Wundt's who came to the U.s.a. in the late 1800s and founded a laboratory at Cornell University (Figure 1.iv). (Titchener was after rejected by McGill University (1903). Perhaps he was ahead of his time; Brenda Milner did non open up the Montreal Neurological Institute until 1950.) In his enquiry using introspection, Titchener and his students claimed to accept identified more than xl,000 sensations, including those relating to vision, hearing, and taste. An of import aspect of the structuralist arroyo was that it was rigorous and scientific. The research marked the kickoff of psychology equally a scientific discipline, considering information technology demonstrated that mental events could be quantified. Just the structuralists besides discovered the limitations of introspection. Even highly trained research participants were often unable to report on their subjective experiences. When the participants were asked to do elementary math problems, they could easily do them, just they could not hands respond how they did them. Thus the structuralists were the kickoff to realize the importance of unconscious processes—that many of import aspects of human being psychology occur outside our witting awareness, and that psychologists cannot await research participants to be able to accurately report on all of their experiences.

Functionalism and Evolutionary Psychology

In contrast to Wundt, who attempted to sympathize the nature of consciousness, William James and the other members of the school of functionalism aimedto understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess (Hunt, 1993). For James, one's thinking was relevant just to ane's behaviour. As he put it in his psychology textbook, "My thinking is starting time and last and ever for the sake of my doing" (James, 1890). James and the other members of the functionalist school (Figure 1.five) were influenced by Charles Darwin'southward (1809-1882) theory of natural selection, which proposed that the concrete characteristics of animals and humans evolved considering they were useful, or functional. The functionalists believed that Darwin's theory practical to psychological characteristics too. Just every bit some animals have developed strong muscles to allow them to run fast, the human encephalon, so functionalists idea, must have adapted to serve a detail function in human feel.

Figure 1.5 Functionalist School. The functionalist school of psychology, founded past the American psychologist William James (left), was influenced past the work of Charles Darwin (correct).

Although functionalism no longer exists every bit a school of psychology, its bones principles take been absorbed into psychology and continue to influence it in many ways. The piece of work of the functionalists has developed into the field of evolutionary psychology, a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural choice to human and animal behaviour (Dennett, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists' bones assumption, namely that many man psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions. Equally we volition run across in the chapters to come, evolutionary psychologists use evolutionary theory to understand many different behaviours, including romantic allure, stereotypes and prejudice, and fifty-fifty the causes of many psychological disorders. A key component of the ideas of evolutionary psychology is fitness. Fettlerefers to the extent to which having a given feature helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a college rate than exercise other members of the species who practice non take the characteristic. Fitter organisms pass on their genes more successfully to later generations, making the characteristics that produce fitness more likely to get part of the organism's nature than characteristics that do not produce fitness. For example, information technology has been argued that the emotion of jealousy has survived over time in men because men who experience jealousy are more fit than men who practise non. According to this thought, the experience of jealousy leads men to be more likely to protect their mates and baby-sit against rivals, which increases their reproductive success (Kiss, 2000). Despite its importance in psychological theorizing, evolutionary psychology as well has some limitations. One problem is that many of its predictions are extremely difficult to test. Dissimilar the fossils that are used to larn about the physical evolution of species, we cannot know which psychological characteristics our ancestors possessed or did not possess; nosotros tin can only make guesses about this. Because it is hard to directly examination evolutionary theories, it is ever possible that the explanations we use are made up afterward the fact to account for observed information (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). Still, the evolutionary approach is important to psychology because information technology provides logical explanations for why we have many psychological characteristics.

Psychodynamic Psychology

Peradventure the school of psychology that is most familiar to the general public is the psychodynamic approach to understanding behaviour, which was championed past Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers. Psychodynamic psychology is an arroyo to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories. Freud (Figure 1.half dozen) adult his theories about behaviour through extensive analysis of the patients that he treated in his individual clinical practise. Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced, including anxiety, low, and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful babyhood experiences that they could no longer think.

Figure one.half dozen Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud and the other psychodynamic psychologists believed that many of our thoughts and emotions are unconscious. Psychotherapy was designed to assist patients recover and confront their "lost" memories.

Freud'south ideas were extended by other psychologists whom he influenced, including Carl Jung (1875-1961), Alfred Adler (1870-1937), Karen Horney (1855-1952), and Erik Erikson (1902-1994). These and others who follow the psychodynamic approach believe that it is possible to help the patient if the unconscious drives tin can be remembered, particularly through a deep and thorough exploration of the person's early on sexual experiences and electric current sexual desires. These explorations are revealed through talk therapy and dream analysis in a procedure chosen psychoanalysis. The founders of the schoolhouse of psychodynamics were primarily practitioners who worked with individuals to help them understand and confront their psychological symptoms. Although they did not conduct much research on their ideas, and although later on, more sophisticated tests of their theories have non always supported their proposals, psychodynamics has notwithstanding had substantial bear upon on the field of psychology, and indeed on thinking about human behaviour more than by and large (Moore & Fine, 1995). The importance of the unconscious in human behaviour, the idea that early on childhood experiences are critical, and the concept of therapy as a way of improving homo lives are all ideas that are derived from the psychodynamic approach and that remain central to psychology.

Behaviourism and the Question of Free Will

Although they differed in approach, both structuralism and functionalism were essentially studies of the mind. The psychologists associated with the school of behaviourism, on the other mitt, were reacting in function to the difficulties psychologists encountered when they tried to employ introspection to understand behaviour. Behaviourism is a schoolhouse of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the listen, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the report of behaviour itself. Behaviourists believe that the human mind is a black box into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received. They fence that there is no betoken in trying to determine what happens in the box because we can successfully predict behaviour without knowing what happens inside the listen. Furthermore, behaviourists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviours. The first behaviourist was the American psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958). Watson was influenced in large part past the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food. Watson and the other behaviourists began to use these ideas to explicate how events that people and other organisms experienced in their environs (stimuli) could produce specific behaviours (responses). For instance, in Pavlov's research the stimulus (either the nutrient or, after learning, the tone) would produce the response of salivation in the dogs. In his research Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could lead the kid to respond with a fearful behaviour to the presence of the objects (Watson & Rayner, 1920; Brook, Levinson, & Irons, 2009). In the best known of his studies, an eight-month-erstwhile boy named Little Albert was used as the discipline. Here is a summary of the findings: The male child was placed in the centre of a room; a white laboratory rat was placed near him and he was immune to play with it. The child showed no fear of the rat. In later trials, the researchers made a loud sound behind Albert's dorsum past hitting a steel bar with a hammer whenever the baby touched the rat. The child cried when he heard the dissonance. Later several such pairings of the 2 stimuli, the child was again shown the rat. Now, notwithstanding, he cried and tried to move away from the rat. In line with the behaviourist approach, the boy had learned to associate the white rat with the loud noise, resulting in crying.

Effigy 1.7 Skinner. B. F. Skinner was a member of the behaviourist school of psychology. He argued that costless will is an illusion and that all behaviour is determined by environmental factors.

The most famous behaviourist was Burrhus Frederick (B. F.) Skinner (1904 to 1990), who expanded the principles of behaviourism and also brought them to the attention of the public at big. Skinner (Figure ane.vii) used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of rewards or reinforcements, to train pigeons and other animals. And he used the general principles of behaviourism to develop theories almost how best to teach children and how to create societies that were peaceful and productive. Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings using the behaviourist approach (Skinner, 1957, 1972).

Research Focus: Practise We Accept Free Will?

The behaviourist research programme had of import implications for the fundamental questions about nature and nurture and about free volition. In terms of the nature-nurture contend, the behaviourists agreed with the nurture approach, assertive that nosotros are shaped exclusively by our environments. They also argued that there is no costless volition, simply rather that our behaviours are determined by the events that we have experienced in our by. In short, this approach argues that organisms, including humans, are a lot like puppets in a show who don't realize that other people are decision-making them. Furthermore, although we do not cause our own actions, we nevertheless believe that nosotros practice because we don't realize all the influences acting on our behaviour.

Recent inquiry in psychology has suggested that Skinner and the behaviourists might well have been right, at to the lowest degree in the sense that nosotros overestimate our own gratis will in responding to the events around us (Libet, 1985; Matsuhashi & Hallett, 2008; Wegner, 2002). In one demonstration of the misperception of our own gratuitous will, neuroscientists Soon, Contumely, Heinze, and Haynes (2008) placed their enquiry participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner while they presented them with a series of letters on a computer screen. The letter on the screen changed every half second. The participants were asked, whenever they decided to, to press either of two buttons. Then they were asked to betoken which alphabetic character was showing on the screen when they decided to press the push. The researchers analyzed the encephalon images to run across if they could predict which of the two buttons the participant was going to press, even before the letter at which he or she had indicated the decision to printing a button. Suggesting that the intention to human activity occurred in the brain earlier the enquiry participants became aware of it, the researchers constitute that the prefrontal cortex region of the encephalon showed activation that could be used to predict the button pressed as long as ten seconds before the participants said that they had decided which button to press.

Inquiry has found that we are more likely to think that we control our behaviour when the desire to act occurs immediately prior to the outcome, when the thought is consistent with the outcome, and when there are no other credible causes for the behaviour. Aarts, Custers, and Wegner (2005) asked their inquiry participants to command a apace moving square along with a computer that was too controlling the foursquare independently. The participants pressed a button to cease the movement. When participants were exposed to words related to the location of the square simply before they stopped its movement, they became more likely to think that they controlled the motion, even when information technology was really the computer that stopped it. And Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, and Aarts (2008) found that participants who had just been exposed to first-person singular pronouns, such as "I" and "me," were more likely to believe that they controlled their actions than were people who had seen the words "computer" or "God." The idea that we are more likely to take ownership for our deportment in some cases than in others is too seen in our attributions for success and failure. Because we normally expect that our behaviours will be met with success, when we are successful nosotros easily believe that the success is the result of our own complimentary will. When an action is met with failure, on the other hand, we are less likely to perceive this outcome every bit the upshot of our complimentary volition, and nosotros are more than probable to arraign the outcome on luck or our teacher (Wegner, 2003).

The behaviourists made substantial contributions to psychology by identifying the principles of learning. Although the behaviourists were wrong in their beliefs that it was not possible to measure thoughts and feelings, their ideas provided new ideas that helped further our understanding regarding the nature-nurture debate and the question of complimentary will. The ideas of behaviourism are fundamental to psychology and have been developed to assistance us better understand the role of prior experiences in a diverseness of areas of psychology.

The Cognitive Approach and Cognitive Neuroscience

Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no exception. Thus information technology is no surprise that beginning in the 1960s, growing numbers of psychologists began to think well-nigh the encephalon and most man behaviour in terms of the figurer, which was being adult and becoming publicly available at that fourth dimension. The analogy between the brain and the calculator, although by no ways perfect, provided role of the impetus for a new school of psychology called cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment. These actions stand for well to the processes that computers perform. Although cognitive psychology began in earnest in the 1960s, earlier psychologists had also taken a cognitive orientation. Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), who studied the ability of people to recollect lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969), who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering. Bartlett created short stories that were in some ways logical but also contained some very unusual and unexpected events. Bartlett discovered that people found it very difficult to recall the stories exactly, even after being allowed to study them repeatedly, and he hypothesized that the stories were difficult to call back because they did not fit the participants' expectations most how stories should go. The idea that our retentivity is influenced by what we already know was besides a major idea behind the cerebral-developmental stage model of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). Other important cognitive psychologists include Donald Due east. Broadbent (1926-1993), Daniel Kahneman (1934-), George Miller (1920-2012), Eleanor Rosch (1938-), and Amos Tversky (1937-1996).

The War of the Ghosts

The War of the Ghosts is a story that was used by Sir Frederic Bartlett to test the influence of prior expectations on retentivity. Bartlett found that even when his British research participants were allowed to read the story many times, they still could non remember it well, and he believed this was considering information technology did not fit with their prior noesis. One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to chase seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: "Maybe this is a war-political party." They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw i canoe coming up to them. In that location were five men in the canoe, and they said: "What do you recall? We wish to take you along. Nosotros are going up the river to make war on the people." One of the young men said, "I take no arrows." "Arrows are in the canoe," they said. "I will non keep. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you lot," he said, turning to the other, "may go with them." Then one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came downwards to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. Just before long the immature man heard one of the warriors say, "Quick, permit us get dwelling: that Indian has been hit." Now he idea: "Oh, they are ghosts." He did non feel sick, but they said he had been shot. And then the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: "Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked united states of america were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick." He told it all, and so he became quiet. When the sunday rose he cruel downwardly. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. (Bartlett, 1932)

In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behaviour, the cognitive approach provided a distinct culling to behaviourism. Co-ordinate to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the heed itself will never be sufficient considering people interpret the stimuli that they feel. For instance, when a male child turns to a girl on a engagement and says, "You are and so cute," a behaviourist would probably see that as a reinforcing (positive) stimulus. And even so the girl might non be so easily fooled. She might try to sympathize why the male child is making this detail statement at this item time and wonder if he might exist attempting to influence her through the annotate. Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we have into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behaviour more deeply. Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, instruction, human being evolution, social psychology, and psychotherapy. The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over the past decade as the effect of recent advances in our ability to run across the brain in action using neuroimaging techniques. Neuroimaging is the use of various techniques to provide pictures of the construction and function of the living brain (Ilardi & Feldman, 2001). These images are used to diagnose brain illness and injury, but they also allow researchers to view information processing as it occurs in the brain, because the processing causes the involved surface area of the brain to increase metabolism and show upwards on the scan. We have already discussed the use of one neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in the research focus earlier in this department, and we will discuss the utilise of neuroimaging techniques in many areas of psychology in the chapters to follow.

Social-Cultural Psychology

A final school, which takes a higher level of assay and which has had substantial impact on psychology, can be broadly referred to as the social-cultural approach. The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behaviour. Social-cultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence each other'due south behaviour. For instance, social psychologists take found that we are attracted to others who are like to us in terms of attitudes and interests (Byrne, 1969), that we develop our own beliefs and attitudes by comparison our opinions to those of others (Festinger, 1954), and that we frequently change our beliefs and behaviours to be similar to those of the people we intendance about—a process known every bit conformity. An important aspect of social-cultural psychology are social norms—the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate (Asch, 1952; Cialdini, 1993). Norms include community, traditions, standards, and rules, as well every bit the general values of the grouping. Many of the most important social norms are adamant by the culture in which we live, and these cultures are studied by cross-cultural psychologists. A culture represents the common set up of social norms, including religious and family unit values and other moral behavior, shared past the people who live in a geographical region (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996; Matsumoto, 2001). Cultures influence every aspect of our lives, and it is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives merely as much equally does our evolutionary experience (Mesoudi, 2009). Psychologists have found that at that place is a fundamental difference in social norms between Western cultures (including those in Canada, the U.s., Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and E Asian cultures (including those in People's republic of china, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Republic of india, and Southeast Asia). Norms in Western cultures are primarily oriented toward individualism, which is about valuing the self and one'south independence from others. Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and to value a sense of their personal self, and to see themselves in large part as separate from the other people around them. Children in Western cultures feel special nigh themselves; they savour getting gold stars on their projects and the all-time grade in the class. Adults in Western cultures are oriented toward promoting their ain individual success, oft in comparison to (or even at the expense of) others. Norms in the Eastward Asian culture, on the other hand, are oriented toward interdependence or collectivism. In these cultures children are taught to focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others. The predominant norms relate to group togetherness and connectedness, and duty and responsibility to one's family and other groups. When asked to describe themselves, the members of East Asian cultures are more likely than those from Western cultures to indicate that they are particularly concerned virtually the interests of others, including their close friends and their colleagues (Figure 1.8, "East vs West").

Figure 1.viii East vs W. In Western cultures social norms promote a focus on the self (individualism), whereas in Eastern cultures the focus is more on families and social groups (collectivism).

Some other important cultural difference is the extent to which people in different cultures are bound by social norms and customs, rather than being free to express their own individuality without because social norms (Chan, Gelfand, Triandis, & Tzeng, 1996). Cultures besides differ in terms of personal space, such every bit how closely individuals stand to each other when talking, as well every bit the advice styles they use. It is of import to be enlightened of cultures and cultural differences because people with different cultural backgrounds increasingly come into contact with each other as a result of increased travel and clearing and the development of the Cyberspace and other forms of communication. In Canada, for instance, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority (not-White) groups is increasing from year to twelvemonth. The social-cultural approach to understanding behaviour reminds u.s. again of the difficulty of making broad generalizations most human nature. Different people feel things differently, and they experience them differently in different cultures.

The Many Disciplines of Psychology

Psychology is not one discipline but rather a collection of many subdisciplines that all share at least some common approaches and that work together and commutation knowledge to grade a coherent bailiwick (Yang & Chiu, 2009). Because the field of psychology is so wide, students may wonder which areas are well-nigh suitable for their interests and which types of careers might be available to them. Table one.five, "Some Career Paths in Psychology," will assist yous consider the answers to these questions. You tin learn more about these unlike fields of psychology and the careers associated with them at http://world wide web.psyccareers.com/.

Table 1.5 Some Career Paths in Psychology.

[Skip Table]
Psychology field	Clarification	Career opportunities
Biopsychology and neuroscience	This field examines the physiological bases of behaviour in animals and humans by studying the performance of different brain areas and the effects of hormones and neurotransmitters on behaviour.	Near biopsychologists work in inquiry settings—for example, at universities, for the federal authorities, and in private research labs.
Clinical and counselling psychology	These are the largest fields of psychology. The focus is on the assessment, diagnosis, causes, and treatment of mental disorders.	Clinical and counseling psychologists provide therapy to patients with the goal of improving their life experiences. They work in hospitals, schools, social agencies, and individual practice. Because the need for this career is high, entry to academic programs is highly competitive.
Cognitive psychology	This field uses sophisticated enquiry methods, including reaction time and brain imaging, to study memory, language, and thinking of humans.	Cognitive psychologists piece of work primarily in research settings, although some (such equally those who specialize in human-estimator interactions) consult for businesses.
Developmental psychology	These psychologists deport enquiry on the cognitive, emotional, and social changes that occur across the lifespan.	Many work in research settings, although others work in schools and community agencies to help improve and evaluate the effectiveness of intervention programs such as Head Kickoff.
Forensic psychology	Forensic psychologists use psychological principles to understand the behaviour of judges, lawyers, courtroom juries, and others in the criminal justice organization.	Forensic psychologists work in the criminal justice organization. They may testify in court and may provide information nearly the reliability of bystander testimony and jury selection.
Health psychology	Health psychologists are concerned with agreement how biology, behaviour, and the social situation influence health and illness.	Health psychologists work with medical professionals in clinical settings to promote amend wellness, bear research, and teach at universities.
Industrial-organizational and environmental psychology	Industrial-organizational psychology applies psychology to the workplace with the goal of improving the performance and well-being of employees.	There are a wide variety of career opportunities in these fields, mostly working in businesses. These psychologists help select employees, evaluate employee performance, and examine the effects of unlike working weather condition on behaviour. They may likewise work to design equipment and environments that meliorate employee performance and reduce accidents.
Personality psychology	These psychologists study people and the differences among them. The goal is to develop theories that explicate the psychological processes of individuals, and to focus on private differences.	About work in academic settings, merely the skills of personality psychologists are also in demand in business organization—for example, in advertising and marketing. PhD programs in personality psychology are oft connected with programs in social psychology.
School and educational psychology	This field studies how people learn in schoolhouse, the effectiveness of schoolhouse programs, and the psychology of pedagogy.	School psychologists work in elementary and secondary schools or school district offices with students, teachers, parents, and administrators. They may assess children's psychological and learning problems and develop programs to minimize the impact of these bug.
Social and cross-cultural psychology	This field examines people's interactions with other people. Topics of study include conformity, group behaviour, leadership, attitudes, and personal perception.	Many social psychologists work in marketing, advertising, organizational, systems blueprint, and other applied psychology fields.
Sports psychology	This field studies the psychological aspects of sports behaviour. The goal is to understand the psychological factors that influence performance in sports, including the function of exercise and team interactions.	Sports psychologists work in gyms, schools, professional sports teams, and other areas where sports are practiced.

Psychology in Everyday Life: How to Effectively Learn and Call up

Ane mode that the findings of psychological research may be particularly helpful to you is in terms of improving your learning and study skills. Psychological research has provided a substantial amount of cognition about the principles of learning and retention. This information can help you do better in this and other courses, and can as well aid you better larn new concepts and techniques in other areas of your life. The most important affair yous can learn in college is how to better written report, learn, and call back. These skills will assistance you throughout your life, every bit y'all learn new jobs and have on other responsibilities. In that location are substantial individual differences in learning and memory, such that some people larn faster than others. But even if information technology takes yous longer to learn than you lot think it should, the extra time y'all put into studying is well worth the attempt. And y'all tin can larn to learn—learning to study finer and to recall information is merely similar learning any other skill, such every bit playing a sport or a video game.

To learn well, y'all need to exist ready to learn. You cannot learn well when you are tired, when you are nether stress, or if you are abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to go along a consistent routine of sleeping and eating. Eat moderately and nutritiously, and avoid drugs that can impair memory, particularly alcohol. There is no evidence that stimulants such as caffeine, amphetamines, or whatsoever of the many "memory-enhancing drugs" on the market will help you learn (Gold, Cahill, & Wenk, 2002; McDaniel, Maier, & Einstein, 2002). Retention supplements are usually no more effective than drinking a tin can of sugared soda, which releases glucose and thus improves retentivity slightly.

Psychologists accept studied the ways that best allow people to acquire new data, to retain information technology over time, and to retrieve information that has been stored in our memories. I important finding is that learning is an active process. To acquire information most finer, we must actively dispense it. One active approach is rehearsal—repeating the information that is to be learned over and over again. Although simple repetition does help us learn, psychological research has found that we larn data nearly effectively when we actively call back near or elaborate on its significant and chronicle the fabric to something else. When y'all written report, endeavour to elaborate past connecting the data to other things that yous already know. If you desire to remember the different schools of psychology, for instance, try to recall about how each of the approaches is different from the others. As you compare the approaches, determine what is near important about each one and so relate it to the features of the other approaches.

In an important study showing the effectiveness of elaborative encoding, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) constitute that students learned information best when they related it to aspects of themselves (a miracle known as the self-reference effect). This research suggests that imagining how the material relates to your own interests and goals volition help y'all learn it. An arroyo known as the method of loci involves linking each of the pieces of information that you lot need to recall to places that you are familiar with. Yous might think most the house that you grew up in and the rooms in information technology. You lot could put the behaviourists in the bedroom, the structuralists in the living room, and the functionalists in the kitchen. So when you need to remember the information, you retrieve the mental epitome of your firm and should exist able to "come across" each of the people in each of the areas.

One of the most fundamental principles of learning is known as the spacing result. Both humans and animals more than easily think or larn cloth when they report the material in several shorter written report periods over a longer catamenia of fourth dimension, rather than studying it only once for a long menstruation of fourth dimension. Cramming for an examination is a particularly ineffective fashion to learn. Psychologists take likewise institute that performance is improved when people set difficult all the same realistic goals for themselves (Locke & Latham, 2006). Yous can use this knowledge to help you lot learn. Prepare realistic goals for the time you are going to spend studying and what you are going to learn, and try to stick to those goals. Do a small amount every 24-hour interval, and past the cease of the calendar week you will have accomplished a lot.

Our power to adequately assess our own knowledge is known equally metacognition. Research suggests that our metacognition may make us overconfident, leading us to believe that we have learned textile even when we take not. To counteract this problem, don't merely go over your notes again and once more. Instead, brand a listing of questions and so see if you can answer them. Study the information again and then exam yourself over again subsequently a few minutes. If you made any mistakes, report once more. Then wait for a half hour and test yourself again. Then test over again after one twenty-four hour period and after two days. Testing yourself by attempting to retrieve information in an active manner is meliorate than but studying the material because it will help you make up one's mind if you really know information technology. In summary, everyone tin learn to learn better. Learning is an important skill, and following the previously mentioned guidelines will likely help you learn ameliorate.

Cardinal Takeaways

• The first psychologists were philosophers, just the field became more than empirical and objective every bit more sophisticated scientific approaches were adult and employed.
• Some basic questions asked past psychologists include those nigh nature versus nurture, free will versus determinism, accurateness versus inaccuracy, and conscious versus unconscious processing.
• The structuralists attempted to analyze the nature of consciousness using introspection.
• The functionalists based their ideas on the work of Darwin, and their approaches led to the field of evolutionary psychology.
• The behaviourists explained behaviour in terms of stimulus, response, and reinforcement, while denying the presence of gratuitous will.
• Cognitive psychologists study how people perceive, process, and think information.
• Psychodynamic psychology focuses on unconscious drives and the potential to improve lives through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
• The social-cultural approach focuses on the social situation, including how cultures and social norms influence our behaviour.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

1. What type of questions can psychologists respond that philosophers might not be able to answer as completely or as accurately? Explicate why you think psychologists tin can answer these questions better than philosophers tin.
2. Choose ane of the major questions of psychology and provide some prove from your ain experience that supports one side or the other.
3. Cull two of the fields of psychology discussed in this department and explain how they differ in their approaches to understanding behaviour and the level of explanation at which they are focused.

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Image Attributions

Effigy i.ii: https://twitter.com/sureteduquebec/status/353519189769732096/photo/one

Figure 1.three: Plato photo (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Platon2.jpg.) courtesy of Bosom of Aristotle past Giovanni Dall'Orto, (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Busto_di_Aristotele_conservato_a_Palazzo_Altaemps, _Roma._Foto_di_Giovanni_Dall%27Orto.jpg) used under CC BY license.

Effigy ane.four: Wundt research group by Kenosis, (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wundt-research-group.jpg) is in the public domain; Edward B. Titchener (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_B._Titchener.jpg) is in the public domain.

Figure ane.5: William James (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_James,_philosopher.jpg). Charles Darwin by George Richmond (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Darwin_by_G._Richmond.jpg) is in public domain.

Figure 1.6: Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt (http://eatables.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sigmund_Freud_LIFE.jpg) is in public domain.

Effigy 1.seven: B.F. Skinner at Harvard circa 1950 (http://eatables.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:B.F._Skinner_at_Harvard_circa _1950.jpg) used under CC By iii.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en).

Figure 1.8: "Due west Wittering Wonderful As Always" by Gareth Williams (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gareth1953/7976359044/) is licensed under CC BY ii.0. "Family playing a board game" by Pecker Branson (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Family_playing_a_board_game_(iii).jpg) is in public domain.

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